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“... the central image of the last poem Rilke ever wrote. Yet Rilke’s letters don’t make for easy reading, and trying to say why is one way of coming close to the core of his poetry. The letters are colourful, varied, rich in metaphor, and full of surprising turns: yet they lack the spontaneity and informality for which we treasure the letters of great ...”

“... Dr Abse’s analogy is false. There are clear differences of degree in anti-semitism. Reviewing Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Eliot (LRB, Vol. 6, No 20), Professor Ricks began: ‘Peter Ackroyd has written a benign life of T.S. Eliot. Given the malignity visited on Eliot, this is a good deal.’ I ...”

“... something like a Conrad who had soaked himself in Beckett, or a Dashiell Hammett who had been reading Camus and Ionesco. These are wild approximations, of course. Onetti’s voice and subject-matter are his own, and their very elusiveness has played a part in his neglect. The other part was played by accident. Onetti was too late for some fashions and too ...”

“... Rage and Betrayal, the highly prejudicial ABC programme of 12 April 1996, in which the newscaster Peter Jennings called McVeigh a ‘monster’ and cited passages from Pierce’s book. Parallels between bomb-making in The Turner Diaries and by McVeigh were made much of in Joseph Hartzler’s opening address to the jury. The only material evidence produced by ...”

“... In ‘A Spring Wind’ Spencer describes himself loving Greece ‘out of all reason’ as he sits reading the poems of Odysseus Elytis. In the wake of Elytis’s 1979 Nobel Prize, a selection of his poems over four decades has been made available in English – a welcome development, though not as rewarding as one might have hoped. As the Hellenic landscape ...”

“... speaking which would offer an advance. There is no sign that this is likely to happen. True, Sir Peter Medawar effected a brief release when challenging his field’s version of the nature-nurture antithesis with the instance of innate potentialities never to be actualised unless the environment were right. But feud is collusive, and the parties usually ...”

“... is a God, the God of the Jews, of Moses and Elias, But this is not the time to speak of him. Peter McDonald has the misfortune of being introduced as one of the most promising of the younger generation of Northern Irish poets. It is of course another accident of priority that the work of any young Northern Irish poet now writing is going to invite ...”

“... that side of the Atlantic, without ever managing to communicate his whereabouts to anyone at home. Peter Ackroyd’s Milton in America (1996) seems curiously, if perhaps unconsciously, parasitic on this earlier extravaganza. Milton, however, despite some fleeting fictional attention from Robert Graves, has never been able to vie with the Romantics in this ...”

“... appropriately) a ‘Wanted’ poster. In April 1939, Auden, Isherwood and MacNeice gave a reading at the Keynote Club in Manhattan. Kallman and another Brooklyn student, Walter James Miller, were in the audience, with Kallman sitting in the front row giving the two international pederasts the glad eye. Afterwards he and Miller went backstage. Miller ...”

“... sage Harold Wilson and all those too feckless to see the connection between muck and brass. Reading his reprinted stuff, which was mostly written out of a sort of turgid, inarticulate resentment rather than with real rage or outrage, one recalls the blustering world of George Brown, Ray Gunter and Robert Mellish – those Labour dinosaurs who used to ...”

“... others, Eric Griffiths. In an essay included in Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work (1985, edited by Peter Robinson), Griffiths expressed reservations about Hill’s ‘unsteady reliance on religious metaphors’ in his critical writings. In Hill’s essay ‘Poetry as “Menace” and “Atonement” ’ in particular, the idea that poetic language may escape ...”

“... of course been exploited by writers in all genres, but seldom with much credibility; the picture Peter Carey gives of them in Oscar and Lucinda, for example, is what might politely be called a travesty. Edmund Gosse is the nearest to an exception. In Father and Son he does not tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, for though the book was not ...”

“... manufactured a French infiltrator called Spy Nozy. How, then, should a Life of Blake be written? Peter Ackroyd is having a go at one, and I suspect that what attracts him is Blake’s London, for which King has very little feeling. The poetry is crowded with London voices and London places. I remember my delight as a student when a supervisor remarked that ...”

“... as well as entertaining to manage it in one of the ways Pritchett can do. I have been reading Dostoevsky again: The Possessed. You know the sensation. You are sitting by the fire reflecting that one of the things that reconciles you to life, even at its most tragic, is the low clear daily monotone of its voice. Suddenly comes a knock at the ...”

“... Cinderella, Bo Peep and Berie sneak off for a smoke in the alley between Hickory Dickory Dock and Peter Pumpkin Eater’s Pumpkin. Neither children nor adults, they are about to learn that story-land is a sad and gory land, and they deride the credulity of children who think otherwise. To the little girl who keeps stroking her glitter and asking for the ...”