“... needed God, ‘as a combination of errand boy and gynaecologist ... How this individual, no longer young and burdened by the personal bothersome errands of Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva and others, manages in his spare time to direct the destinies of the universe is simply incredible.’ Trotsky’s view of God was as conventional as his view of women. All tyrannies ...”

“... in his two great decades. Neither Leavis nor Empson was conspicuously successful in discovering young talent: during World War Two Empson was for a time passionately enthusiastic about the mild romantic verse of Sidney Keyes. In America, Wilson seems in later years to have sensed that the youthful Randall Jarrell might emulate his discernment of the ...”

“... the prosecuting counsel, had let Oscar down very lightly; and he commented on the ‘renters’, young male prostitutes, one of them wearing ‘her Majesty’s uniform – another form of female attire – who were allowed to hang around after giving their evidence and wink at likely persons’. Max was under no illusions regarding the corruption of ...”

“... was to rival the Angelic Doctor St Thomas Aquinas. I tried to imagine, as I read this book in Robert Hurley’s translation (which is on the whole excellent, although there are two mistranslations on page 85 which make a mess of an already difficult paragraph), what it would be like to read Theory of Religion without knowing any of Bataille’s other ...”

“... in the Essay on Criticism illustrates a different Neo-Classicism. Virgil is first imagined as a young poet, scorning ‘the Critick’s Law’ and drawing only ‘from Nature’s Fountains’. But later, says the next couplet,             when t’examine ev’ry Part he came, Nature and Homer were, he found, the same. There is a tacit ...”

“... offering an account both of her marriage and of the extraordinary circle of friends, including Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell and Saul Bellow, that Berryman gathered at this period. Berryman’s life can be summarised, albeit crudely, as follows: he was born in 1914, the son of John Allyn Smith, who died in 1926, apparently by ...”

“... The year Strauss was born, 1864, saw the publication of Robert Browning’s Dramatis Personae. The author of Andrea del Sarto would have found in Richard Strauss a subject ideally suited to his imaginative powers. He would have cast the composer, not, I think, in his early years, but towards the end of his life: in 1940, perhaps, in late summer ...”

“... children, dark, hoarded property. The golden stone of its modest neoclassical façade, designed by Robert Edis in 1883, blends into the street front overlooking Green Park. If you had to guess what lay inside you might hazard a hedge fund, or a tax avoidance consultancy, or empty space, left to fatten. Experimental art and its practitioners, surely, left ...”

“... decided at the outset I wasn’t going into all that,’ he told me. American biography, as Robert Caro’s vast Life of LBJ reminds one, is something else again. Whereas British political biography, with the (white) elephantine exception of Martin Gilbert’s Churchill is, almost as a matter of professional pride, a one-volume affair, there is a well ...”

“... With a loud bang and a dazzling burst of brilliance, the young genius, driven by an inner daemon, destroys the old order and erects a new one in its place. When the Origin was published, by contrast, Darwin was a placid, middle-aged country gentleman and doting paterfamilias, who described his own foremost scientific ...”

“... It will end in 2025, with the bicentenary of the end of the wars and the independence of Bolivia. Robert Harvey’s splendid book gives us the first large-scale narrative of Latin America’s struggle for independence in English since – well, when exactly? It is hard to think of any comparable attempt to come to grips with the whole vast story, and in such ...”

“... not an easy thing to have on your conscience that you were personally responsible for putting Robert Mugabe in power but Wilfred Mhanda has had to live with that knowledge for the last 24 years. You might think the last year, which has seen 32 murders, countless cases of rape, torture, arson and beating, all to help Mugabe steal an election, would have ...”

“... If so, how and why did they separate? And, finally, have they now been reconciled? Robert Maillart’s Salginatobel Bridge of 1930. The modern distinction, at its simplest, is that architects invent – draw or model the shapes they want materials to take – and engineers calculate how those shapes, when realised, would respond to the ...”

“... power far superior to that of any other English peer, and second only to the king’s. For the young Richard II, who was almost exactly of an age with his cousin, this was not a comfortable prospect. Mortimer believes that he was also jealous and resentful of Henry’s applauded manly accomplishments. Their relations, and Richard’s relations with ...”

“... homily in the mouth of the Duke of Norfolk in the ridiculous first scene of Richard II where two young lords spoiling for a fight, Norfolk and Bolingbroke, swagger before their monarch. No one explains the reason for their quarrel. Norfolk, rather like some of Mr Carter-Ruck’s clients, seems to be an over-sensitive upper-class twit. The King has some good ...”