“... Both writers are concerned to stress their fine sensibilities, Reed in a surrealist mode, Kirkup more in the manner of a Nineties aesthete. Reed claims that at the age of 19 he was already living in ‘a blaze of heightened perception’ prompted by drink and drugs. He believes poems are prompted by withheld orgasms, ‘the work on the page ... like the line ...”

“... killed off by the war the vacuum was filled by the extravagant romanticism associated with Dylan Thomas, George Barker and Edith Sitwell. Less than a decade later, with those roses seen as over-blown, Robert Conquest was deploring ‘the omission of the necessary intellectual component from poetry’, gathering several disparate writers under one ...”

“... is an act of love, the novel itself is an expression of hatred – German self-hatred, which, Thomas Mann said, ‘goes to the point of self-disgust and self-abomination.’ The blurb tells us that the four chief characters in the novel represent the four elements of the German soul : ‘music, bureaucracy, arms and religion’. The story is set in Rome ...”

“... in the previous history of womankind.’ Opposition came, strangely, from the liberal scientist Thomas Henry Huxley. In reply to a telegram from Herbert Spencer asking support for the burial, Huxley wrote:   It can hardly be doubted that the proposal will be bitterly opposed, possibly with the raking up of past histories, which had better be ...”

“... to become, for a while, so genuinely romantic and melodramatic, his fabrications seem to add yet more brio to the larger-than-life swagger; the shaggy-dog stories become part of a more general shagginess. He may not have cremated his dusky bride by the shore of a tropic sea, but he was to cremate Shelley on an Italian ...”

“... worst thing you could call Robert Frost was ‘literary’. ‘If I’m somewhat academic (I’m more agricultural) and you are somewhat executive, so much the better,’ he wrote to Wallace Stevens teasingly in 1935. ‘It is so we are saved from being literary … Our poetry comes choppy, in well-separated poems, well interrupted by time, sleep and ...”

“... led by such avatars as Alan Everitt, Peter Laslett, J. H. Plumb, Lawrence Stone, Keith Thomas and E. P. Thompson, now constitutes a substantial body of knowledge that has transformed our conception both of British history and of what constitutes legitimate historical inquiry. The modish topics of birth and death, the ...”

“... from his mentally unstable wife. She presided over his household in London and in the country as a more or less acknowledged common law wife. Hackman, who left an elegantly written suicide note and comported himself with dignity throughout, rapidly became a celebrity, too. The night of the murder he had in his pocket a letter that Ray had returned to him ...”

“... or otherwise. Governance, Foucault argues and Fassin and Rechtman agree, works as much, if not more, through the ‘production of truth’ as through the imposition of laws. The question is not whether someone actually is a victim of trauma but how the criteria for deciding who is a victim come into being and who manages them. ‘Governmentality’, as ...”

“... of dividedness, where the ‘self’ that is doing the criticising or restraining is in some sense more sophisticated or more knowing, as well as more in command, than the ‘self’ that is being criticised or restrained. But when we talk about being ‘self-revealing’ or ...”

“... world famous, yet ultimately human enough for their allied Anglo-Tibetan opponents to outwit them. Thomas Goodfellowe MP, fictional hero as battered old teddy bear, is due for another outing this autumn, says the blurb. By then, where will our real-life hero, the Dalai Lama, be? Thomas Carlyle was wrong, on the whole, about ...”

“... error here: Bunter’s age is always 15.) A figment of popular culture, in other words, of no more substance than Desperate Dan. Ah, but Hughes imagines the future author of the Greyfriars stories, in or about 1907, doing the rounds of English public schools in search of characters to insert into his projected schoolboy series, and – having exhausted ...”

“... Norse myths are probably more familiar than classical ones in the modern world, perhaps even more familiar than the Old Testament stories Europeans were once brought up on. That is remarkable when one considers the almost vanished literature on which our knowledge of the myths is based ...”

“... says she said, ‘what have they done to you?’ The Arthur who loathed perfume and powder and who more than once had ordered his girls to scrub the paint off their faces was gussied up with cosmetics, It made her laugh and cry. She told him he looked terrible. She reminded him of her promise not to abandon him – and straightened his tie. As she got ready to ...”

“... which it encountered. In 1966, Professor James Bertram brought out the New Zealand Letters of Thomas Arnold, which included all Clough’s longer ‘anti-podistic’ letters to his friend between 1847 and 1851: these had been omitted from F.L. Mulhauser’s Correspondence of A.H. Clough (1957). The New Zealand Letters proved a fresh and vivid ...”