“... had a worldly political purpose. Many of the Surrealists claimed an adherence to Communism that may have embarrassed more run-of-the-mill Party members, but that was nonetheless sincere. The collectivisation of art, entailing, of course, the abolition of the artist as ‘property-owner’ of his work, was an important part of the Surrealist campaign. The ...”

“... preface to his Collected Poems (1963): ‘A poet who has been too a sharp critic of other poets may ruefully expect even sharper criticism than his poems deserve.’ He may expect it, but let us disappoint his expectations. Suppose we reject the tit-for-tat, beggar-my-neighbour principle on which Grigson’s literary ...”

“... The most terrifying comment made on the Abdication may well be that of Lord Beaverbrook, writing twenty years after the events in which he played such a prominent part: if the British people, he said, had been less absorbed in the affair of Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson the energy thus saved might have been used to avert world war ...”

“... are literal addresses, presupposing a divine listener; dialogues written up after the event may be reports of transactions believed ‘really’ to have taken place. In any such transaction, God has always been deemed a direct participant. But Herbert’s poems are fictions ‘which imitate or represent prayer’, and in some ways this book extends to ...”

“... white with the ‘horror of life’. In fact, this was often how they saw themselves. Disease may be the great leveller, the only effective manifestation of the democratic spirit, but for these men it often became a sign of grace and unique destiny. The 19th century was perhaps the only one that proclaimed that art was bad for you. Contemporary medical ...”

“... The media attention accorded to acts of infamy may or may not figure in the motivations of mass killers, but it must certainly count among the compensations of homicide as a moral career. In the wake of his conviction for murdering and dismembering six lonely young men at that dreaded address, Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill, Dennis Nilsen must have basked in the thought that, even behind bars, he was still free to roam through the darker corners of the minds of all those people who had scorned or ignored him when he was a Job Centre counsellor and a pub bore ...”

“... much weight on Peter Jenkins’s account of Mrs Thatcher in tears before the Westland debate (‘I may not be Prime Minister by six o’clock tonight’) in order to agree with him that the whole affair made her look weak and her government out of control. No doubt luck was just as important in the politics of the 1900s as of the 1980s. But what prime minister ...”

“... John Braine, Mary McCarthy ... (a shade slyly, Mrs Spark, after all a director in her own way, may here be self-indulgently thinking of some of her own old pals). He meditates the great turn of the times that may be upon us, and dreads God’s dreams because, unlike his, they are real. His solace is a black ...”

“... seeing shortages of medicines that people take month in, month out. A House of Commons report in May listed a few of the reasons: geopolitical factors such as the war in Ukraine, the after-effects of the Covid pandemic and the disruption of supply chains in the wake of Brexit. It also pointed to manufacturing and distribution problems (the result of a lack ...”

“... is a bit surprising coming from the stately Eliot, though the experience to which he refers may in some forms be common enough. He certainly experienced it, or something that puts him or us in mind of it. If the word is used as equivalent to ‘frisson’ (and lexicographers defining frisson seem unable to avoid ‘shudder’), we can propose a debt to ...”

“... the US), Hughes damns damn near everybody. He follows the uncompromising American dictum that you may attack whomever you like as long as you attack them for being unwilling to compromise. A New York Times reviewer called the book ‘post-modern rather than high Enlightenment’, a surprising but sound judgment if we understand ‘post-modern’ as describing ...”

“... word in the text, and added a footnote on its ‘connotations’. But of course an editor may modernise without being insensitive, just as we may object to this instance without attacking modernisation per se. Similarly, modernised punctuation may be more or less sensitive to the ...”

“... him fables about them, in order to signal and avoid an unwelcome thought. He settles on what may seem a rather narrow and self-regarding interpretation of what he calls his ‘disturbance of memory’. His doubt about getting to Athens, he says, ‘had to do with the strictures and poverty of our living conditions in my youth’. He didn’t think he ...”

“... at least the trousers, worn by so many Western female political leaders, from Merkel to Clinton, may be convenient and practical; they may be a signal of the refusal to become a clothes horse, which is the fate of so many political wives; but they’re also a simple tactic – like lowering the timbre of the voice – to ...”

“... at answers; philosphers after my heart will rather wish to convey the thought that while there may be no satisfying answers to such questions in certain forms, there are, so to speak, directions to answers, ways to think, that are worth the time of your life to discover.’ This characterisation of philosophy should not appear as alien as it is sometimes ...”