“... that source: deflected by Auden’s idiom towards psychological theorising, he allows the poem to peter out with talk of how ‘the lonely and unpopular’ can rediscover at the museum ‘the landscapes of their childhood’; the attraction of the Pitt-Rivers is reduced to nostalgia for dusty childhood boxrooms. When he attempts a similar accumulation of ...”

“... inclusion, among the author’s acknowledgments, of ‘My thanks, too, to local farmers, including Peter Unwin, for letting me pick their weeds.’ What about those pine tips? Should the Forestry Commission have been thanked too? Jane Grigson’s acknowledgments in her Vegetable Book (first published in 1978) include thank-yous to people who ‘tasted ...”

“... in Mark’s Gospel, which in general avoids such affirmations and times this one to coincide with Peter’s denial. Klassen is sure that at the time of the arrest Jesus addresses Judas (and no other disciple, anywhere) as ‘friend’, but does not acknowledge that hetaire can be otherwise translated – for instance, James Moffat, admittedly rather ...”

“... on holiday when Christopher’s body was found, and that the penny hadn’t dropped even when she read about it at Manchester airport ‘because I knew him as Chrissy and they didn’t call him that in the paper. He was always scrounging, asking for a fag. He could give you a bit of lip but he was all right. I keep thinking we’re going to see him coming ...”

“... reproduces his bill from a pizzeria in Verona, dated 1980: it was in this restaurant that he first read about the murders (but not yet the fate or names of the murderers). It shows the date of the dinner, the price of the pizza and the wine, and the names of the owners. One of them is called Cadavero. You wouldn’t have to be paranoid to feel targeted by ...”

“... accounts of this period, such as Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) by the German literary critic Peter Bürger, the project of aesthetic purity, which we used to call ‘modernist’ (as in abstract painting), and the mission to reconnect art and life, which we used to label ‘avant-garde’ (as in Dada or surrealism), are usually distinguished as two ...”

“... he apparently had a touch of dyslexia and was not much good at punctuation the diaries are hard to read. Many entries, especially when they concern his schooldays, are repetitive, and some simply lack interest, so the editors cut a good deal that treats of games and other trivialities. Evans compensates for these lacunae by reproducing the selected items ...”

“... based on Bertrand Russell’s 1927 lecture ‘Why I am not a Christian’: ‘If you were to read his essay,’ he tells the dean, ‘and in the interest of open-mindedness I would urge you to do so, you would find that Bertrand Russell, who is one of the world’s foremost logicians as well as a philosopher and a mathematician, undoes with logic that is ...”

“... be discovered. My first encounter was a series of debates at the back of the football bus in which Peter Ustinov took on Ribbentrop’s son on the justice of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. A few months later, these ideas, and other ideas – Surrealism, colloquial poetry, and the new architecture – were everywhere. There was a new dawn, but a dawn forced on by ...”

“... Women in the camps were given a temporary reprieve from the gas chamber on condition that they read to her. Was her inability to read being offered as a partial excuse for her crimes? Was Schlink playing on the emotions of his readers in order to blur distinctions where, for the sake of history and justice, there should ...”

“... sitting back and thinking about Porter’s Boeotia’,† an essay which takes off from Peter Porter’s poem ‘On first looking into Chapman’s Hesiod’, and which seems to have followed on from their interchange at the 1975 Poetry Australia ‘Write-In’. Athens and Boeotia are seen as ‘two models of civilisation between which Western man ...”

“... Tynan’s flamboyant, showstruck, star-fucking excitement, he too was an invigorating critic to read ... Why Tynan was influential within the theatre is hard to explain.’ (Jonathan Miller, who likes explaining, is particularly interesting when he finds something ‘hard to explain’. Tynan, too, liked explaining.) ‘There was a certain gullible, vulgar ...”

“... met, Jack Edge,’ Binding drifts dangerously close to the mythical bucolic never-never land of Peter Ackroyd’s English Music. He shares with Ackroyd a love of music-hall, or its wilder sibling, the Punch and Judy show. On one level, that is what A Perfect Execution is. An exhibition in a tent or a glass box at the end of the pier. Pantomime horror, like ...”

“... down at full throttle’, these phrases not only seem to me to misdescribe the poems we have just read, they don’t seem to describe any Rilke poem we could imagine. Think of this delicate, simple, stately late poem, and ask yourself about the throttle (the English translation is Snow’s): Ach, im Wind gelöst, wieviel vergebliche Wiederkehr. Manches, was ...”