“... so sold on the Early Victorian ethos? Interesting though unanswerable questions. What matters, it may be thought, is Browning’s audacity in denying us, in the closing verse, the full rhyme we’ve been so emphatically led to expect. Asymmetry, discontinuity – all the mileage that Modernist artists were to get from these principles is foreshadowed in this ...”

“... for voyages as a form of literature, partly because the New Criticism ignored them; yet he may be battering at an open door, for surely the great mass of readers, who do not give a damn for the New Criticism, have never ceased to agree that ‘these narratives ... are a special kind of writing with distinctive values of its own.’ And it is likely ...”

“... failure at the headwaters of the Missouri – is another question. Lewis’s subsequent slump may have been nothing more, or less, than the anti-climax which many people experience after a burst of intense, dangerous activity, especially when the occasion producing the initial steeled response has fallen out of the public attention. A veteran of the ...”

“... places, with sudden, untranslatable visions, with the Infinite. The problems of the Enlightenment may be unanswerable, beyond certain remarks about secularism and the march of Reason, but the siting of Romanticism is no less difficult. It may be said that it’s to do with German idealist philosophy, with political ...”

“... itself. Smollett’s translation of 1755, now reissued, pre-dated this capture, and perhaps it may be said that the translation assisted a romantic reading of Cervantes which it was also equipped to avert. His opinion of the work, expressed a little earlier in the Preface to Roderick Random, was ‘classical’ enough: Cervantes’ ‘inimitable piece of ...”

“... truth has sometimes been described as the idea of the infinite imprisoned within the finite. It may be less contentiously characterised as the belief that the capabilities and the demands of the self are disproportionate to its circumstances,’ The reason this agreeable solution to the problem of solidarity is so hard to attain and maintain is precisely ...”

“... is at times an equivocal business. There’s always the question of what, exactly, of value they may tell us, of what there is that makes their publication more than merely intrusive. Forster lived a long time, and there’s some sorry reading in the second of these volumes. To Joe Ackerley in 1947 from the USA: ‘the view from the window is the Californian ...”

“... diaries are by tradition kept in the office of the present chief at Century House, Lambeth. It may be that, like some of his predecessors, Mr Curwen (who can expect his knighthood within the year) uses the diaries to entertain visitors with their colourful details of Cumming’s pre-First World War disguises. These disguises, however, are not to be taken ...”

“... faith in the canon and turning to different forms of cultural studies. But their disillusion may be premature. English poetry has not been as one-sidedly conservative as is frequently supposed, and needs defending against many of its defenders – whether overt reactionaries or ‘liberal humanists’ who display an extraordinary complacency about the ...”

“... have often wondered whether Borges’s Funes, so uncannily similar to Luria’s Mnemonist, may have been based on a personal encounter with such a mnemonist’, he muses in a footnote to Mr Thompson’s story. ‘Funes the Memorious’ is the story of someone inexplicable and astounding: ‘A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, lozenge ...”

“... We’ve​ got form, Michael Gove and I. ‘Richard Evans may hold a professorship,’ he told the Daily Mail in 2014, after I had attacked him for claiming that Britain had fought the First World War for democracy, ‘but these arguments, like the interpretations of Oh! What a Lovely War! and Blackadder, are more reflective of the attitude of an undergraduate cynic playing to the gallery in a Cambridge Footlights revue rather than a sober academic contributing to a proper historical debate ...”

“... across different minds and times – the sense that we are all one, and that mind and matter may not be entirely separate – is the ground-tone of Hill’s earlier work. The remarkable unstoppling of Hill’s muse in the later 1990s was partly the result of his being prescribed lithium for depression. ‘How is it tuned, how can it be untuned,/with ...”

“... Their aim is scattershot, but they do have some ammunition. The first decade of the 21st century may have been the hottest on record, but global temperatures did not get significantly hotter in the course of the decade as they had in the 1980s and 1990s. There are several possible explanations for this, one of which is the protective effect of sulphate ...”

“... of Theory as it has influenced literary study in the last few decades. The settling of accounts may be timely, given that so many ‘new approaches’ have run out of steam. But the real test of the book comes in the chapter called ‘Touching Reading’, which goes beyond survey-mode and argues for a style of criticism that is alert to touch and tact. The ...”

“... Protection Agency, is a more committed climate change denier, though even he is circumspect. Last May, when he was Oklahoma’s attorney general, he wrote a piece in the National Review attacking Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which he was in the process of suing the EPA over when Trump nominated him to lead it: ‘Scientists continue to disagree about the ...”