“... it would appear, although, as Martin indicates, the relations between FitzGerald and his poem may be more complex than that. He did not think of himself as a poet, though he discovered a unique way of writing a poem, a way that could never be repeated. Nor could it be improved on. FitzGerald’s endless tinkerings with his stanzas reveal that dolorous ...”

“... further study in themselves – that of Hartich Sierk of North Ditmarsh: ‘God send that there may be an end at last; God send that there may be peace again. God in Heaven send us peace.’ Parker himself refers more than once to the war memoirs of an English mercenary, Captain Sydnam Poyntz (there seems to have been no ...”

“... example, normal chimp and normal human haemoglobin differ by only one unit, and this difference may well be quite inconsequential. Meanwhile some humans have another type of haemoglobin differing by another single unit. This difference has huge consequences. On the one hand, it gives its possessor resistance to malaria, and on the other hand it produces the ...”

“... and totality of physical love, and the difference between this and whatever other arrangements may have to be made. Mrs Weldon’s celebration of this discovery is not only fervent: it is worshipful. The spiky ladies who populated her earlier novels now fade into the background, while the foreground is dominated by a woman and her lover, and what passes ...”

“... some of its peculiar characteristics – in particular, the vast and disconcerting erudition which may be off-putting to British readers. He is concerned with an area corresponding to the département of the Var, east of Marseilles, around Toulon and on what is now the Côte d’Azur, within a chronological framework which takes in the first half of the 19th ...”

“... facto, about his or her own work is not necessarily more valid than anything the serious outsider may say of it. But with work so interpenetrated with the writer as woman, this position cannot be held. It is best to start with something that Rosamond Lehmann herself has said about her work. In a late book, the autobiographical fragments of 1967 called The ...”

“... questions about the moral implications of art. The actual pictures and prints of this period may not make one’s mouth water as the earlier work does, but this sober and reflective and perplexed late Dürer is essential to the whole. It is also the starting-point of the first great episode of mythopoeic thinking about him, which took place during the ...”

“... in which Frank Kermode and I and until lately Helen Gardner have severally earned our keep? We may believe indeed that the Oxford English Faculty maintained, while Dame Helen was a member of it, a standard of considerate civility by which our own institutions may be judged and found grievously wanting, though gossip ...”

“... but to go around pretending he’d already joined! The blackballing was thorough and, some may have hoped, conclusive. Certainly, next time round Le Carré was back in the Circus with his moles and lamplighters. Looking back on all that disdain, Le Carré must now be enjoying an ironic chuckle. Eight or so years on, his latest novel has already been ...”

“... Air Force exercises, and meticulously planned every moment of his day. Abraham Guillen, who may be thought the main exponent of the theory of urban guerrilla warfare in Latin America – he died in 1969 – believed that it would lead to repression and dictatorships, which would then, be overthrown by an armed alliance of peasants and workers. Such an ...”

“... Unionist politics at the time. Building on the foundations that he has laid, three further lines may, perhaps, be suggested. Politically, the link between tariff reform and the Liberal Party needs further exploration – and the link with the Labour Party, too, if one thinks of Blatchford. Grayson and the British Socialist Party. Despite its title, this book ...”

“... wrong. Although he correctly predicted the dates for the major offensives in the West in April and May 1940, he had several times cried wolf before that. This was not Oster’s fault – Hitler’s personal whim or unfavourable weather caused the cancellation of several intended attacks – but one can hardly blame the politicians and civil servants who ...”

“... paintings that Fried discusses), both concentrate intently on what they are doing, and yet one may seem to be improving his shining hours, another wasting them. My point is not, of course, that we are to understand the painting of opposed absorptive states, industrious and idle, in the simple terms that would believe that an 18th-century public would have ...”

“... belief in the arbitrary or culturally relative nature of beauty based on mathematical proportions may not have been a false trail. But what is the alternative? In his Ancient Theology (1972), Professor D.P. Walker discussed the Renaissance argument that God had revealed certain Christian truths to pagan sages such as Plato and Zoroaster. The argument was ...”

“... when we try to estimate the quality (not just the fact) of his attraction to Fascism. It may be true that Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 disgusted Yeats and turned him against the Italian dictator. But that does not explain the nature of Yeats’s initial fondness for the idea of authority embodied in Italian Fascism and in the Action ...”