“... collections of the writings of Thomas Paine and his contemporaries in the 1790s, John Thelwall, Robert Owen and the British Utopians, and the responsibility for producing a Chartist canon could not have fallen into better hands. Few scholars can match Claeys’s ability to render 19th-century radicalism and socialism coherent by locating ideas which have ...”

“... In 1974 Robert Nozick shattered the political complacency of the philosophical establishment when he published Anarchy, State and Utopia, a book arguing that justice had nothing to do with equality. Justice is about individual property rights, Nozick argued. You get what you make or find or work on (if no one else has made or found or worked on it first), and you get what you bargain for or what others choose for their own good reasons to give you or leave you in their wills ...”

“... appeared on page 618; the same letter in the new edition concludes on page 816. Yet those figures may understate the extent of the transformation achieved by the new edition. The earlier edition contained 509 letters by T.S. Eliot, 37 by his first wife, Vivien, and 40 by various others. The new edition adds 195 more letters by Eliot, another 27 by Vivien and ...”

“... renewing the vows of his poetic faith and pronouncing against old heresies. His position may sound embattled but we know that it is eminent. His aggravations have become his quirks, so that, for example, when he speaks of ‘the mindless sludge of surrealist verse’, we feel it to be less an expression of anger and revulsion than a reminder that in ...”

“... peace’ they have achieved that ‘Some shall be pardoned, and some punishèd.’ In the film Robert Stephens as the Prince convincingly says: ‘All are punishèd.’ Justice is not what’s to come: it is what they are miserably living with.The streets of the city are very busy in the film, and the walls and piazzas and churches seem to enjoy their ...”

“... murals are spectacular but often threatening, and the question is not so much who as how. Robert Harris’s novel of the same name tells us that ‘conclave’ – the private assembly of cardinals to elect a new pope – means ‘with a key’, and the movie makes even more haste than the book to show us that the key is lost and so are several keys ...”

“... world of the arts, where supply is eternally in excess of demand, and one finds shelter where one may. Nor am I recommending any variety of Noble Savagery or Doing-your-own-thing. The latter is a contemporary phenomenon worth noting as one of several factors in the weakening of poetry as a public affair. A lot of interest is shown in poetry today, compared ...”

“... last poem in the book: ‘I understand “Annunciations” only in the sense that cats and dogs may be said to understand human conversations (i.e. they grasp something by the tone of the speaking voice), but without help I cannot construe it.’ Alvarez’s introduction to The New Poetry, when I read it as a teenager, left me even more baffled since I had ...”

“... North & South (1946), and a Pulitzer Prize in 1956 for her second, A Cold Spring. Writing to Robert Lowell in 1958, she confesses to feeling ‘green with envy’ over Lowell’s ‘kind of assurance’ in the poems of Life Studies, and adds that ‘it is hell to realise one has wasted half one’s talent through timidity.’ Bishop’s ‘timidity’ is ...”

“... last sole-authored play, The Tempest, had been performed two years earlier). He may have used it as a pied à terre, but by the time he came to write his will, almost exactly three years later, the house had a tenant living in it. During Walker’s ownership it had also been leased to a tenant, a haberdasher called Henry Ireland, whose ...”

“... researcher’s heart would not thrill at the words: ‘Please burn this letter that no mortal eyes may read it’? Manuscripts may seem to offer the pleasures of the peephole but no serious historian would argue that personal manuscripts offer access to unvarnished, unmediated truth. Letters do not simply display our ...”

“... have their own account of who they are and what they’re doing. The professional demographer may classify someone according to a set of categories widely recognised among experts, but unrecognisable or even offensive to the person being classified. An economist may insist that someone is maximising their welfare on the ...”

“... I could, but imaginative truth is simultaneously honourable and suspect, and I knew that my India may only have been one to which I (who am no longer what I was, and who by quitting Bombay never became what perhaps I was meant to be) was willing to admit I belonged. This is why I made my narrator, Saleem, suspect in his narration: his mistakes are the ...”

“... discord now resolved as a tribute from Diana, her tutelary goddess. Philip Sidney in The Lady of May, the little entertainment he staged in 1578 at Leicester’s park and gardens of Wanstead, went so far as to impose an unscripted speaking part on the Queen, presumably without warning, forcing her to adjudicate between two fictional rival ...”

“... hard to tell. The middle-aged literary grandees who took him up were all university-educated and may have found Barker’s unschooled eloquence refreshingly different, or simply been stunned by his confidence and good looks. Alanna Autumnal, published in 1933, contained a characteristic piece of bravado, citing under ‘By the Same Author’ one as yet ...”