“... that he was feeling something of the pride and joy felt by the Poles themselves: their masters may be puppets of Moscow, but a Pole was now running the Catholic Church. He was always in the forefront of any action to assist the Eastern European dissidents. Solidarity was obviously very close to his heart. His most sustained involvement in practical affairs ...”

“... of other poets? An analysis of the verbal ‘ups’ and ‘downs’, such as Ricks gives us here, may have its interest, but if we imagine that we are thereby saying anything about the poetry, or think such things a clue to the affinity between poets, we are surely mistaken. One of the most interesting essays in this book is that on Beddoes, billed as ...”

“... and, fleetingly, in Ernest Jones’s biography, where he appears as the ‘cretinous dwarf’ who may have saved Freud’s life after an operation. Little Goethe, intellectual giant and homunculus, world-beater and world-renouncer, author of ‘my famous paper Against Behaviourism’, will live for ever: but unlike the Sybil he’s condemned to permanent ...”

“... weeping over his ‘sordid lust’); and separation, ultimately, from his class, which he suspects may regard him as a panderer to ‘the likes of them’, the middle classes, whose property poetry is and for whom he has become a busker, flat cap in hand. Like some of Seamus Heaney’s poetry, Continuous celebrates language while recognising that to acquire it ...”

“... often happened in production, to tilt the play towards a quite different meaning.Yet the problem may be deeper than that. Brecht looked for historical instances and for parables as a way of teaching us lessons, not only about history, but about the contemporary world. The method quickly engages us, but in the case of Galileo, for example, the problem now is ...”

“... so comfortless. Tracy seems to be saying, not ‘There is no hope for us,’ nor even ‘There may be hope somewhere, but not for us,’ but ‘Only when we’ve lost hope altogether can we begin.’ Begin what? That’s another ...”

“... or Mr Pooter. So, it is not surprising that some have suspected that his memoir is a hoax. We may more safely suppose that he was a genuine person, striving to be candid against all the odds. We leave him running a sex education class for the local youngsters, ‘calling a spade a spade’, against the local vicar’s advice. Witter Bynner is a more wily ...”

“... bit. A pity, perhaps, that it had to be the Express: but then an awful lot of miners read it. It may be that much confusion would be avoided in British political discourse if we had a popular analogue of the French word travaillisme. Gormley’s ‘socialism’, he says, was always ‘a gut belief’; it had nothing to do with books, or intellectual ...”

“... but also because everything Disraeli said or did is subject to qualification by something else he may have done or said at some other time. Consider, for instance, the idea of Disraeli as a kind of Zionist-before-Zionism. Surely, one thinks, his novel Alroy, which is about a medieval Jewish leader who wishes to redeem the Jews from captivity and bring them ...”

“... for the Black Panthers. ‘Radical Chic’ has passed so far into the Anglo-American argot that it may be futile, 13 years later, to attempt to expose it. For one thing, it was so nearly right. Everybody knew somebody who answered or fitted the description. For another, the older and cleverer phrase – limousine liberal – had gone out with Adlai Stevenson ...”

“... Its tragic aspects (it is probable that Mozart is dramatising his wife’s suffering, though she may have exaggerated it to him) have the quality of a recitativo accompagnato. Only after the prelude, with its double address both to the friend and to the lodge brother, does the curtain rise on the troubled scene. It begins with the exclamation ...”

“... to throw some light on it might be considered Foster’s central endeavour: whatever Petrarch may have said to the contrary, ‘it is inconceivable that an artist of his calibre should have spent so much time and trouble on materials he regarded as of only minor importance.’ Indeed, Foster hints at a change of heart in Petrarch himself, a re-evaluation ...”

“... pathetically out of his depth as minister. Much the same was true of the convertibility crisis. By May 1947, the Treasury knew that import cuts were needed to halt the dollar drain, and warned accordingly. Again and again, ministers dithered, until, in the end, the crisis forced their hands. After 1947, however, there were no more horror stories of this ...”

“... 1939 by-election, but since he gets the name of the winner (and his precedessor) wrong, his memory may be at fault. Wilson’s shift to Labour came, I would suspect, later, during the war, as he watched Labour rising high in the polls and the popular imagination. His career in Parliament from 1945 to 1964 picked a careful path through the shifting fortunes of ...”

“... book would no doubt be successful: more so, perhaps, than the one Tama Janowitz has written, which may explain why her publishers have pushed it out front. But seekers after cheap thrills are going to be disappointed. Sex and violence are almost eerily absent from Slaves, and so far from ‘caring less’, the characters who haunt its pages care obsessively ...”