“... mettle in the towns, where they could prepare for government once the Red Army had come through. Peter Conradi handles this material extremely well, and draws on E.P. Thompson’s lectures in Stanford in 1981 about his brother, later collated by his widow, Dorothy Thompson, as Beyond the Frontier. E.P. is more committed than Conradi to the idea that Frank ...”

“... more than half a century earlier. Homosexual acts had just been decriminalised (although Grant read the manuscript before that happened and asked: ‘Shall I be arrested?’), but it was still unnerving to have one’s private life put on display. A year earlier Peter Stansky and William Abrahams had published Journey to ...”

“... but from Habermas, Lawrence Klein, Howard Caygill, Terry Eagleton and Bakhtin, as restated by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White. The result is both fashionably cultural-materialist and safely old art-historical, supposing paintings to be socially determined primarily by discursive texts of the sort art historians require to explain an artist’s ...”

“... a distinguished collection of essays on one Stuart minister who advanced British hegemony – Peter Lake urges historians not to link Early Modern crises ‘directly to contemporary concerns about Northern Ireland, the union with Scotland and the European union’. It strikes me that Lake devalues the past, though, when he plays down its connections with ...”

“... open to Elizabethan influence (appropriate, indeed, to a replica playhouse), can nevertheless be read without anxiety by modern audiences. At which point, the company could do worse than turn to Dr Hattaway’s book, which concentrates uncompromisingly on the theatrical dimension of late Elizabethan drama. Wide-ranging but informed, critically alert and ...”

“... books, but no match for Leavis’s dismissive account of Shelley in Revaluation (1936). Herbert Read, G.Wilson Knight, Frederick Pottle and many other defenders argued that Shelley’s poetry is sustained by the coherence of its imagery, and that the work as a whole shows an extremely intelligent mind fully in touch with the philosophy and science available ...”

“... for a hundred years or more, Bardic Romance was a major form. Forgotten now, or doomed to be read only by critics, books like Miss Severn’s Anne Hathaway; or, Shakespeare in Love enjoyed mass appeal in Victorian England. One fatuous confection by Robert Folkestone Williams, The Youth of Shakespeare, went through six editions in three countries, besides ...”

“... As the unwary traveller hurries into Heathrow’s international bookstall hoping to light on a good read for the plane, his eye is assaulted by a thwacking array of swastikas on black, gold and blood-red fields. Approaching them at random but with a certain circumspection, he finds, for example, Philippe van Rindt’s The Trial of Adolf Hitler, in which it is revealed that Hitler survived his attempts at suicide in the bunker; The Murder of Rudolf Hess, by Hess’s Spandau doctor, demonstrating that the prisoner who the other day celebrated his 85th birthday is not Hess at all, but a small Nazi only too glad to avoid vengeance from his fellows by impersonating the great in perpetual concealment; James Pool and Suzanne Pool’s Who financed Hitler?, which opens with a luxurious gathering of bankers and party ‘higher-ups’ with their sleek women, just a shade less exotic than the gathering in a Japanese restaurant of Spanish-speaking kameraden that begins The Boys from Brazil ...”

“... Yes, I would have been tempted to think Lodge was over-egging it too, if I’d happened to read his essay only a couple of months ago. But then I read High Fidelity, and started seeing exactly what Lodge meant. Just look back at the very top paragraph of this review. How much documentary detail we seem to have picked ...”

“... is a symptom of schizophrenia; it is a form of telepathy. I thought Ronald Reagan could read my mind. In 1979 I had been reading Kafka’s love letters and as a result wrote a letter that I didn’t sign, telling a history undergraduate that other students masturbated while thinking about her. Years later Mr Reagan referred to this young woman as ...”

“... not the kind to whom you could confess your desires and ambitions. It’s actually refreshing to read a biography that doesn’t assume that the real point of the genre is to show us the ‘real’ person, and assumes the ‘real’ person is to be found in hitherto unrevealed depths of feeling, but it’s probably harder for a biographer to be confident of ...”

“... burden tends to drain them of ordinary kinds of biographical interest, as if we are not allowed to read the novel of Freud’s life for the story alone. One consequence is that his biographers can still routinely leave a reader wondering what Freud was like (not to mention what it felt like to be Freud). Two new biographies, one French and one American, ask if ...”

“... the New Fiction Society, Goff has laboured with the dedication of a fanatic to make the British read quality novels – something that does not come naturally to them. It has been a long haul, but with the Booker Prize, Goff has succeeded magnificently. A large segment of the public now uses the Booker shortlist as they might the selections of a book ...”

“... And the other Amis? – they are examining the candidates (not all of whom they can possibly have read) rather than the judges. If I were Mr Ron Pollard of Ladbrokes (whose odds have got a great deal meaner since the days when some of us cleaned up on Salman Rushdie at 14-1), I would give only cursory attention to the books on the short-list: instead I would ...”

“... the Drum office: Lewis Nkosi, Bloke Modisane, Arthur Maimane, and the photographers Bob Gosani and Peter Magubane, Winnie Mandela’s friend, now in New York; Can Themba, whose home in Sophiatown was known as ‘The House of Truth’; Casey Motsisi, who began one column, ‘No nooze is good nooze, but no booze is sad nooze indeed’ – a sentiment warmly ...”