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“... characters the names of her intimate friends. Julia Briggs shows that two of Nesbit’s lovers – Richard Reynolds and Oswald Barron – are saluted in the figures of Dicky and Oswald Bastable. She also suggests that in these books Nesbit represented herself as twins: a weedy boy poet and his spirited sister. The weed’s name is Noel: Mrs Briggs has ...”

“... argued, but frequently shot down. ‘Tony Crosland is fifteen times the man Fred Mulley is,’ Richard Cross-man noted on one occasion, ‘but dim little Mulley boring away at his departmental brief gets the Department’s way ... whereas despite his brilliance Tony often doesn’t even succeed in helping his Department.’ Crosland gave a bleakly ...”

“... page of this fine collection is without some comparable finesse of style, and the two translators, Richard and Lucia Cunningham, have worked hard for the marvellous combined effect of limpidity and obscurity which Maria Luisa Bombal creates. Crispin Kitto’s The Antarctica Cookbook is more of a confidence trick than a novel. But the reason why such a shoddy ...”

“... darkness’). I suppose the point is that gemina nox ‘lacks authority’. But Catullus had not read the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, and the hypallage is not so unusual. Goold’s translation is in prose, but follows Catullus’s lineation. Very occasionally it lapses into metre (‘Attis borne in speedy vessel/on the crest of seas profound’), and equally ...”

“... be seen.’Some special forces memoirs have been so popular they have led to pulp franchises. Richard Marcinko, the first commander of SEAL Team Six, later convicted of defrauding the US government, published his bestselling memoir, Rogue Warrior, in 1992 and followed it with more than a dozen thrillers fictionalising various SEAL missions. Eric ...”

“... doing well’. Birt agreed, with consequences for the BBC as a whole. But it is also clear from Richard Lindley’s long, densely researched history of Panorama that the programme’s perceived importance over the past fifty years has been generated as much by its own staff, with their professional egos and particular working practices, as by outside ...”

“... are advised to close their eyes and listen to the music (remarkable by any standards) but not to read the supertitles. That may be the best advice when all is said and done, but it wouldn’t have pleased Wagner. His commitment to opera as drama was vehement and frequently announced. (In his essays, Wagner was the kind of writer who never says anything ...”

“... agitated emotion and toning down many of its adventures, his translation is readable in a way that Richard Burton’s lurid and archaisising version, made fifty years later, is not. Lane expurgated, Burton fantasticated. There have been many wilful translations in the book’s history, a history that in its geographical, linguistic and picaresque range echoes ...”

“... than in the post-October path towards terror and dictatorship. Orlando Figes, author of a widely read study of the revolution, The People’s Tragedy (1996), devotes a lively essay to showing that, had a disguised Lenin not been admitted without a pass to the Congress of Soviets on 24 October, ‘history would have turned out differently.’ In play here are ...”

“... at Harvard, in Paris, and with various firms, he opened his own office in 1962. Influenced by Richard Neutra, the Austrian emigré who also practised locally, Gehry gradually turned a Modernist idiom into a funky LA vernacular. He did so primarily in domestic architecture through an innovative use of cheap materials associated with commercial building ...”

“... copies sold out on the second day, is Gyorgy Moldova’s The Heaven Cart. Mr Moldova is much read for his colourful and sometimes trenchant studies of the lives of working people, and he also has a way with titles. Earlier books include St Cow, an exposure of the working conditions of women in a textile factory, and The Person who was Touched by the ...”

“... of ‘obscenity’). It says on page 3, wrongly, that in the same case John Mortimer defended Richard Neville, and on page 122 that he did not. In one of the brief excursions into cinema, there is a very muddled account of the French treatment of pornographic films. Pasolini’s Salo was not assigned to the ‘P’ category and sent to the blue ...”

“... the University Library – and went mad for him. So mad, really, that he never recovered. When he read Dante he said all the right things (‘pure muscle, nothing superfluous’) but drew no conclusions about his own use of language, which from the beginning until the end was always stiff with thou, yon, tho’, ere, o’er, thro’, oft and (wince-inducing ...”

“... as a poet. There are indications that he had been to Bologna to use its libraries and to read philosophy; he knew Latin and had most likely studied with Brunetto Latini, an eminent rhetorician more than forty years older than him; people were beginning to invite him to write poems and letters for them. But if it was now possible to surpass Cavalcanti ...”

“... June. Coming to the end of English Pastoral, James Rebanks’s second volume. It’s harder to read than A Shepherd’s Life, with the central section about the onset of factory farming not easy to take. Thankfully, though, in his own life at any rate the tide turns and Rebanks regains his grip on traditional farming and with it offers some hope, without ...”