“... by students in the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading and published by the department’s press, Whiteknights; it is now reissued as a joint venture by Whiteknights and Bloodaxe. Pound always rather prided himself on being ‘out of key with his time’, to quote from the first line of ‘Hugh Selwyn ...”

“... forthright about Dickens’s unrelenting coldness to his mother and his wife. More centrally, his reading of Dickens’s late work – the novels, stories and the first-person journalism – show how far it reflects events in his life. Dickens spent his last years in constant travel and increasing pain. He moved between his house, Gad’s Hill, and his ...”

“... visit, during a tour in crippling heat of the ruined fortifications constructed around the port by Peter the Great, Wilhelm again forgot his instructions and buttonholed the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Kokovtsov, on one of his latest hobby-horses, the need to establish a pan-European oil trust to compete with American Standard Oil. The ...”

“... 1936 they had to abandon Chelsea for something more modest. At this low moment Joyce was asked by Peter Fleming, then a leader-writer on the Times, to help enliven the Court Page, whose only light relief from the comings and goings at the Palace was a series of articles about flora and fauna – ‘Woody Plants for Limey Soil’ or ‘Family Cares of the ...”

“... as of the continual experimentation involved, he moved to Berlin to work in the office of Peter Behrens, ‘a colossus of daunting stature’. He had no contact with Behrens himself, but did learn about ‘rhythm and subtle relations and many other things previously unknown to me’. That admission must have cost him dear: he was strikingly ungrateful ...”

“... there for 12,000 years before the Europeans showed up. Printers vied to slake the thirst of the reading public for tidings of points west. Utopia was duly mapped as an island somewhere in the west Atlantic. More did his best to give its physical being credibility: Ambrosius Holbein, Hans’s elder brother, furnished a woodcut of it for the 1518 Basel ...”

“... not be kept from the world and a manuscript was sent to their friend Mary Russell Mitford in Reading with instructions to print a very limited number of copies. These slim volumes, bearing the title Sonnets by E.B.B., then seem to have disappeared from view, parcelled up with some of Mitford’s other books and papers at her death before making their way ...”

“... explicitly gay love poems. It is easy to imagine F.O. Matthiessen and his lover Russell Cheney reading it in the Twenties. Since they had no role models and no sense of being part of any tradition it was the sort of work which was important for them. Matthiessen wrote: ‘Of course this life of ours is entirely new – neither of us knows a parallel ...”

“... the essential, the thrilling thing was to ‘smack the pansies down’. The period covered by Peter Parker’s astonishing two-volume compilation culminates in the pansies’ at least partial vindication, the long deferred passage of the Wolfenden Committee’s recommendations into law in 1967. Together these books present for the first time an assemblage ...”

“... and Todorov himself. A substantive collection that is not similarly guilty of sexism is Peter Caws’s issue of Social Research entitled ‘Current French Philosophy’.* In addition to exemplary essays such as Sarah Kofman’s on Kant and respect for women, it contains a representative deconstruction by Derrida of the philosophical notion of ...”

“... time at the Trafalgar Studios. I saw the first production at Wyndham’s in 1964 with Madge Ryan, Peter Vaughan and Dudley Sutton. Good in the part Sutton was already too old, as have been most of the actors who’ve played in it since. It’s a play I would dearly like to have written, though these days for it to retain its shock value the young man should ...”

“... in archives and indexed and endlessly examined. His works were meticulously edited by the late Peter Davison. This creates a big problem for his biographers. There’s just too much life. No biographer wants to be the one who fails to mention, say, that Orwell in Spain, ‘having passed the train journey up from the front gorging himself on ...”

“... Bathurst – outstaying their welcome and Ben vividly recalled.Bathurst is particularly good, reading a Betjeman poem about golf, following it up with a very funny (and almost better) poem in parody by Ben himself. Since I know him chiefly from work, Ben’s outspoken and eccentric personality is news to me, with both his sons saying how lucky they felt ...”

“... more by the designer on his first visit in July 1957 (he had pictured the site by knowledgeably reading marine charts). ‘He’s our Gary Cooper!’ a Sydney matron gushed on sighting the tall, blond, blue-eyed Dane and hearing his exotic, Norse-tinged English, a change from the somewhat harsh local accent. Although his idea was little more than a ...”

“... The Olivier chapters in Carey’s novel are cleverly and consistently crafted, but I found while reading them that I was mentally turning the pages, impatient to get back to Parrot. Parrot and Olivier in America is much preoccupied with the subject of freedom. Prisons and imprisonment crop up all over the novel and inform its imagery. The question of what it ...”