“... the flat roof which for decades afterwards served as the Politburo’s reviewing stand for May Day and Revolution Day parades in Red Square. On such occasions, Getty writes, ‘the Politburo stood on Lenin’s tomb – literally on his body.’ The idea that traditional (Muscovite) practices resurfaced in the Soviet period has a long genealogy in ...”

“... bleak emotional weather of autobiographical works such as Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002). Coetzee may not actively seek this response, but he can hardly be surprised by it. In Diary of a Bad Year a character who closely resembles the author – more of this figure later – imagines his father’s opinion of him. ‘A selfish child, he must have thought, who ...”

“... 11 short pieces called ‘The Payne Whitney Poems’. The Payne Whitney, I knew from reading about Robert Lowell, was a New York mental hospital, in the same way I knew from reading Lunar Caustic that the Bellevue was a New York mental hospital, and here was a clutch of texts fit to set beside Malcolm Lowry’s book, or Lowell’s ‘Waking in the Blue’ or ...”

“... of flintlock at dawn, but it is still associated with a certain glamour. The high-living image may hold true for some American ambassadors, many of whom are big donors and political appointees, but it’s not a realistic picture for most diplomats. In fact, diplomats are often quite isolated from the societies to which they are posted. Their central task ...”

“... more than her share of misogynistic sex-baiting and condescension. Yet in some uneasy degree one may also sympathise with Hutchins’s first critics. There is something peculiar about the novelist’s erotic preoccupations, her almost queasy-making interest in the sensations of embodiment. Witness the first paragraphs of Victorine, the best of the eight, now ...”

“... Morris scholar John Drinkwater, as though to oppose it would be derisive of the common mood. Robert Byron, less precious than usual, regretted that ‘according to official and ecclesiastical standards … a bit of the old Roman wall is of more importance than Nash’s Regent Street, and one ruined pointed arch than all Wren’s churches put ...”

“... as one of the advantages of a nepotistical system. The author is a little puzzled, as the reader may well be, to know why so many Lyall dependents looked to ‘Uncle William’ for a career. As a dispenser of life’s prizes William hardly compared with his elder brother George, who was chairman of the East India Company and a Member of Parliament for the ...”

“... New York found the place almost monastic. Leary loved to turn people on, with various results. Robert Lowell, for example, seems to have felt uncomfortable. There are some scary bits, in Flashbacks, that force one to admire the recklessness of Leary. The hidden presence of the CIA is menacing, as was (and no doubt is) the extent of the Agency’s interest ...”

“... nothing about them, because we learn almost nothing about Richards either. This glazed reticence may, however, tell us something in itself, especially if it is viewed as part and parcel of the public persona of the man in the middle of the Modern Movement. At this point, let me lay my own credentials on the table, since what follows stems in part from my own ...”

“... about which we know a great deal, from documentary evidence and living informants. His new book may be seen as a courteous but firm reproof to those who, like me, brought up on Arthur Machen, John Buchan, Rosemary Sutcliff, Mary Renault and Henry Treece, not to mention H.P. Lovecraft, got the wrong idea a long time ago and have been reluctant to abandon ...”

“... In one of several investigative reports on the topic, the Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr wrote in May 2017 that ‘what is happening in America and what is happening in Britain are entwined. Brexit and Trump are entwined. The Trump administration’s links to Russia and Britain are entwined. And Cambridge Analytica is one point of focus through which we can ...”

“... 1568 founded the seminary in Douai for the training of English missionary priests, and the Jesuit Robert Parsons, the position taken by the Catholic and Protestant authorities alike was that men faced damnation in dissembling their faith. Nevertheless, a way around the dilemma was found in the doctrine of mental reservation, which was most fully developed in ...”

“... have been perfectly at home in the introduction to a student edition thirty years ago. It may be that the task he sets himself – that of taking proper cognisance of reception aesthetics, current bibliography and the more convincing variants of post-structuralism, while nonetheless producing cheerfully definitive thematic readings – is simply ...”

“... Washington the day before Martin Luther King was shot, and arrived in Los Angeles a week after Robert Kennedy’s assassination.’ In spite of these omissions, Sara Maitland has found in her own fiction ‘a pride in the Sixties’, a regret for ‘a period that was culturally significant, an explosion of energy’, which she contrasts with the shameful ...”

“... greasy till’. Was it For this that all the blood was shed, For this Edward Fitzgerald died, And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, All that delirium of the brave? ‘Delirium’ suggests Yeats’s usual equivocal insight; but more magnificently it celebrates the fever in the blood which was about to quicken the national pulses yet again. ‘Romantic ...”