“... market, for instance – that resemble similar moments in When the World Was Steady and are close to being rather too exultant demonstrations of descriptive skill. The differences between the two books are nevertheless considerable, the new one setting itself far more ambitious problems. Some are particularly interesting, as when the narrator claims the ...”

“... Klein’s son Eric, so couldn’t go to her himself, but his analyst was Joan Riviere, very close to Klein, and his wife was a patient of hers. Readers of this journal may recall Wynne Godley’s complaint that his analyst, Masud Khan, was himself a patient and confidant of Winnicott – Robert Rodman even conjectures a homosexual attraction – all the ...”

“... of one day and a reprimand. He was an almost incomparably hard worker – though Halliwell ran him close – and is justly regarded as basically an accomplished and original scholar. The Freemans think his Shakespeare edition of 1842-44 the best there was before the long-lived Cambridge Globe edition of 1864. In certain respects he anticipated the work of the ...”

“... the most famous and impressive was the lighting of the entirety of the spiral-ramped rotunda of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum – daylight was not excluded as it is at the Hayward.) On one level, Flavin’s installations are exercises in simple geometry. The possible configurations of standard tubes and colours – even those of plain white ones ...”

“... Idon't care what Wystan says,’ Frank O’Hara wrote to Kenneth Koch. ‘I’d rather be dead than not have France around me like a rhinestone dog-collar.’ He was responding to Auden’s admonition on reading O’Hara’s and John Ashbery’s entries for the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1955: ‘I think you (and John, too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any “surrealistic” style, namely of confusing authentic non-logical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue ...”

“... still uses him as sexual deviancy’s whipping-boy (‘his behaviour often hovered dangerously close to being that of a paedophile,’ snorted Christopher Hart on the day Brian Gilbert’s movie Wilde was released). Julia Prewitt Brown sees him as a philosophical heavyweight; and celebrates his ‘dodginess’ in order to instal him in a post-dualist ...”

“... Winogrand, what could be done with ease and subtlety at home was harder to achieve abroad. Robert Frank worked in Britain between 1951 and 1953. Born in Switzerland but based in New York, he was still half-hoping his pictures would appeal to a magazine like Life but at the same time he was trying, as he wrote, to ‘break from the Traditional … trying to ...”

“... in her own unwilling way to have also been the imaginative catalyst in their world. Katherine Frank makes the interesting point that both Charlotte and Anne, in their second published novels, drew heavily for inspiration on Wuthering Heights. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall has a doomed gathering whose names all begin with H. Jane Eyre has the unquiet ...”

“... this regard his marvellous, semi-autobiographical prison-camp memoir, House of the Dead, runs it a close second. Read in the West only by professional Slavists and students of Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary allows us to see him at both his best and his worst. It contains some of his most moving autobiographical pages, and records his contacts with, and ...”

“... with this subject at various points, he never comes to grips with it. At the very end, he comes close to explaining why. It is evident that Klein does not think sufficient funds will be forthcoming to sustain the consensus in the form in which it has existed in the past. Therefore, he foresees the need to lower expectations as to what the Health Service can ...”

“... ways of bringing off feats of comparable virtuosity, but they are unlikely to be discovered by close imitation. Attempts to do so may have an undesired outcome: the shadow of the older novel might darken or distort the new one. In the present case it doesn’t. Zadie Smith’s real debt may not lie in her echoes of Howards End, though she does insist on ...”

“... Kosovo. ‘No calamity is ever described with perfect truth.’ But this fine book must come very close to it. It makes the subject important, not just as a type of catastrophe but as a sensitive exploration of the way it can implicate those who do not directly suffer. Charles and Mary Lamb selflessly, patiently, served the Wordsworths by interviewing ...”

“... of 1919 provided what was probably his best moment. He studied the world’s leaders at close hand. He respected Lloyd George, a very smart bedint, but thought the rest of them ‘ignorant and irresponsible men cutting up the world as though it were a cake’. He supported the League of Nations, deplored reparations and other revanchist ...”

“... schoolfellows make allowances for him. Aitken, in the Hughes novel, complains about the travesty Frank Richards made of his character – obese he may have been, obtuse never. There’s the History Prize he won in 1910 to testify to his possession of actual brains in place of the low cunning ascribed to Bunter. It may also be meant to remind us of Aitken’s ...”

“... when Boswell pays an early visit to Bolt Court and Johnson barks ‘briskly’ from his bed: ‘Frank, go and get coffee and let us breakfast in splendour.’ And he is there late at night, when Boswell is too tired and tanked-up and talked-out to go back to his lodgings, and is settled into the spare room ‘by honest Francis with a most civil ...”