“... Amory reports, is ‘the most ancient in Europe that it has been possible to tabulate’. (There may be other contenders – but who’s tabulating?) At her memorial service Noel Annan told the story – it’s repeated here – of how ‘at a dance she heard O’Neill ask his partner to sit out on the stairs. “I don’t want to do that,” objected the ...”

“... Faced with this kind of derogation, and considering how much time writing reviews can take up, it may be worthwhile to take stock. What is the point of taking on regular reviewing assignments? Shippey’s answer is something of a let-down. The point, it seems, is that reviewing, with its ‘discipline’ of ‘real’ deadlines, concentrates the academic ...”

“... a cogent statement of empiricism would be like in any language other than English. This last claim may at first sight seem absurd to anyone who has read the sometimes witty and always rigorous exposition of logical positivist doctrine that appeared in Erkenntnis in its great days. And it is of course true that in the Thirties in Oxford the young A.J. Ayer was ...”

“... return to the quotable James – she ‘never allows facts to make her uncomfortable’, and there may be much of fantasy in the autobiography. But in her account of her relationship with her mother there is a feeling of truth; and the story is consistent with her febrile pursuit of an ideal relationship in adulthood. Her mother eventually left Nohant for ...”

“... who had written them, and that he had no sense of self-criticism, ever. Hardy’s turn to verse may be the most interesting event in his life during these years, but it is not a major subject in his letters. Here neither literature nor life concerns him much: his principal subjects are business and health. It is interesting, for a little while, to see what ...”

“... by the certain knowledge that if they fight both will lose? According to his mood, the Almighty may be greatly amused that his most ‘intelligent’ creation is at risk of using his brains to destroy himself; or He may react like Arkel in Pelléas et Mélisande: ‘Si j’étais Dieu, j’aurais pitié du coeur des ...”

“... a great step forward for humanity. This essay was first published soon after the ‘events’ of May 1968 and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and it is perhaps a sign of those times that special attention is given to the ‘Jacobinical determination to wipe out the aristocracy of the mind’. This certainly existed in 1793-4, but the Revolution was a lot ...”

“... will rather note the vicar who loves Christ but can’t love God. But newcomers to Powys-land may wonder what the fuss is about. The last chapter of John Cowper’s Autobiography has the strange heading ‘There’s a Mohawk in the Sky!’ Is it a man, is it a bird? Is Powysianism a cult, a fan-club, a Welsh academic festival? Let us turn to Recollections ...”

“... for so long on the subject of Churchill and the Second World War. Reading between the lines one may guess that in Gilbert’s view the evidence tells in favour of Churchill and against his critics. But since events are observed exclusively through the eyes of Churchill and his circle, we are back with the problem of the fly on the wheel of the coach. The ...”

“... for evidence. The assumption that one can enter so completely into another person’s mind may endow a scholarly biography with the undertones of a romantic novelette: ‘The fear that she had destroyed Jogiches haunted her; could she have broken that man, so strong, so invincible? It was like a bad dream. Somehow she would get him back.’ More ...”

“... texts. Norman White is more expansive than Robert Martin about the influence the Welsh language may possibly have had on Hopkins’s poetry. From 1874 to 1877 he was studying theology at St Bueno’s College in North Wales at the end of which time he was ordained priest. During these years the Deutschland was wrecked and the poem written. As he says in the ...”

“... violent – the belief in race and nation. Riddle? Farce? Silence? The regimes of Eastern Europe may have been oppressive and iniquitous, but the fiction and poetry written under them were for a time quite outstanding. This was partly because of the system, which was oddly literary in outlook and valued writers, though of course not as much as ...”

“... plausibly increase and accumulate as evolution traverses the path. It appears, in fact, that there may be several such paths; eyes have been independently reinvented many times in the course of evolution. It is, however, one thing to show that evolution might have been mostly adaptation; it is another thing to show that it actually was. Many readers ...”

“... dramatise by disguise, to the point where disguise itself became the object of art. Homosexuality may have been at the core of this knowledge, but more important was the instinct to personalise sexuality, so that it referred to themselves alone, a pure individualness in which the disguises of art could rejoice and revel, displaying themselves in their own way ...”

“... He certainly did not mean to comfort or console us either. He speaks harshly of poets whom we may have admired in our time: ‘A period which can laud the poetry of Keyes is no period for me.’ But he does take care to explain: A war poet is not one who chooses to celebrate a war but one who reacts against having a war thrust upon him: he is ...”