“... themes. Mrs Fitzgerald used to be published by Duckworth, as were or are Caroline Blackwood, Alice Thomas Ellis and Beryl Bainbridge: all practise surprise and cultivate oddly-angled observation. There remains a certain strained resemblance between Fitzgerald and Bainbridge, though the latter is less elegant and altogether more wicked – I think because she ...”

“... renaissance (to a considerable extent an Anglo-Irish affair). His not altogether helpful champion, Thomas MacGreevy, loudly claimed him for Ireland, but Samuel Beckett, deploring this as he deplored attempts to exaggerate his own Irishness, claimed Yeats as an international master. That, as it happens, was Yeats’s own view. In all modesty he declared himself ...”

“... The member yielded not seed but, at the Circumcision, blood. The Circumcision was described by St Thomas Aquinas as ‘a remedy for original sin, which is transmitted through the act of generation’. God further condescended when consenting to enact this sacramental admission of guilt, though of course free of it himself. Steinberg again and again ...”

“... century used the law against political opponents. The example given here concerns the bookseller Thomas Williams, who was charged with blasphemy for publishing Tom Paine’s Age of Reason. Although Paine said that the Bible described a devil under the name of God, his real offence was of course his support of the revolutions in America and France. Blake ...”

“... that refer to these claims. Among the novels about which she has most to say is Death in Venice. Thomas Mann was 35 when he met the original of the boy Tadzio, whose beauty prevents Aschenbach from achieving ‘Platonic sublimation’. Consequently, Mann, with his aesthetic imperative, cannot offer ‘a primarily moral account of what it means to live into ...”

“... Charles Eliot Norton lectures she declares, with no shadow of demonstration or argument, that Thomas Hardy the poet ‘cannot by any standard of evaluation be called great’. Though an Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford obviously speaks on such matters with authority, for Dame Helen to deliver herself of this ex cathedra judgment solely ...”

“... De Quincey, who declared in his Suspiria that remembered dreams were ‘dark reflections from eternities below all life’, would not have been surprised that modern critical analysts try to discover master patterns, configurations of images or narrative elements, underlying all his writing, asking of what eternities below these compulsive patterns are the reflection ...”

“... It is an indication of her independence of mind that among the influences she admitted we find Thomas Hardy, whose poetry, on the face of it, belonged to another age: she took what she wanted wherever it came from. Yet she very well understood the modern American virtues of Williams, Stevens, Cummings, Eliot, Pound, Kenneth Burke and Yvor Winters; and, in ...”

“... certainly in Shakespeare’s own hand: namely, three pages, 147 lines, in the manuscript play Sir Thomas More. This play, never printed or performed, was mainly the work of two or three minor dramatists of the period – it was not at all unusual to patch plays together in this way. Their first attempt ran into censorship difficulties and at some point the ...”

“... of her less perceptive observations: she was hardly right about everything. In an obituary, Helen Thomas, a journalist Mitchell liked to ring, said: ‘She was a personal victim of the political war of Watergate, and one of its very few heroines.’ Five years after the Watergate break-in, Nixon said: ‘If it hadn’t been for Martha Mitchell, there’d have ...”

“... music and painting with mathematics, economics and philosophy, the person you end up with is Frank Plumpton Ramsey. A fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, Ramsey was born in 1903 and died before he turned 27, having done extraordinary work in all three fields. He is revered by academics, his influence evinced by the almost comical range of ideas named ...”

“... Macquarie, or its near neighbour the Bogan, must be the unnamed river that figures, and floods, in Thomas Keneally’s new novel. Keneally, too, has mythic ambitions. His heroine, Kate, born Gaffney, married Kozinski, is escaping from a failed marriage and a consequent disaster so appalling we are not told what it is for fear that the disclosure might ...”

“... Fritz August von Kaulbach of her as a Pierrette with her four brothers as Pierrots. ‘The young Thomas,’ Katia wrote in her book Unwritten Memories, who was 14 years old at the time the picture was done (I was six), was still living in Lübeck and, like so many others, saw the picture in a magazine. He liked it so much that he cut it out and tacked it ...”

“... country for the inevitable war. During this time he was again drinking too much, often with Dylan Thomas, and occasionally more grandly with Eliot and John Hayward. He claimed that in these Marchmont years he was enjoying himself very much, but he was not idling. He was quite heavily involved with Mass Observation, and so with Charles Madge and Kathleen ...”

“... little in common with the flock of his piously learned exegetes. If it is all in Augustine or in Thomas Aquinas, then let us read Augustine or Aquinas.’ Dante is sublime because he is arbitrary and personal and productive of anxiety and uncanniness, like Shakespeare, and perhaps a bit like Bloom, too, for his determination to be a deep reader of that to ...”