“... and political fables about modernity. The rise of democracy coincided with the transition from wood to coal, and decolonisation in the 20th century precipitated the growth of fertiliser consumption, air travel, motor vehicles and industrial agriculture around the world. ‘The mansion of modern freedoms,’ Chakrabarty argued, ‘stands on an ...”

“... remembered my name without making a patronising show of it, and stayed to tell a good story about Christopher Hill and John Sparrow, and of how he’d been the unwitting agent of a quarrel between them, while ignoring an ambitious and possessive American professor who kept yelling ‘Eye-zay-ah! Eye-zay-ah!’ from across the room. (‘Yes,’ he murmured at ...”

“... was correcting their existing taste rather than banning a writer they had not yet encountered. Christopher Hilliard’s English as a Vocation shows that applicants to Downing were expected already to have read large swathes of Shakespeare, 17th-century poetry, Romantic poetry and 19th-century fiction. Hilliard has dug up not only the entrance exams that ...”

“... Inadmissible Evidence, or for that matter, Alpha Beta by Ted Whitehead, Veterans by Charles Wood, The Arbour by Andrea Dunbar, or Caryl Churchill’s plays directed by Max Stafford-Clark, or the plays of Christopher Hampton, Joe Orton, David Hare, Howard Brenton, Athol Fugard or Sam Shepard. The tradition of ...”

“... palms and soft lamps. A clutch of buildings is dominated by a high villa, furnished in dark wood and heavy drapes; after Stalin’s death, the villa passed to the collective ownership and pleasure of the Politburo, more recently to become a high-class sanatorium. In one of the outbuildings, a billboard spells out the stern order of Soviet collective ...”

“... a man who doesn’t want the child his wife is pregnant with, was published here last year in Christopher Middleton’s translation.* More recently, PN Review published Gert Hofmann’s ‘The Return of the Prodigal’, a short story translated by his son, about the return of a poet to his father’s house: the son begs the father for ...”

“... we find one of Bellini’s greatest paintings, his late altarpiece of Saint Jerome between Saints Christopher and Louis of Toulouse, which is reproduced on the jacket of The Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice. The book opens with a consideration of which elements in this painting were conditioned by its setting. The church interior is illustrated in black and ...”

“... kind of falling away. (The gain is obvious enough and thus less interesting to analyse.) I asked Christopher Hitchens, long before he was terminally ill, where he would go if he had only a few weeks to live. Would he stay in America? ‘No, I’d go to Dartmoor, without a doubt,’ he told me. It was the landscape of his childhood. Dartmoor, not the MD ...”

“... scholars – C.K. Stead, Ronald Bush, Julius himself – believe that the review was by Eliot. Christopher Ricks doesn’t disagree with this judgment – whether or not Eliot wrote the review, he observes in T.S. Eliot and Prejudice, it has ‘the stamp of his approval and the stamp of his tone’. Calling the anonymous notice ‘shameful’, Ricks ...”

“... of, such as the new Kensington Central Library. Sometimes they dressed up as Victorians, or as Christopher Wren in a bath chair, and carried a cardboard coffin symbolising the moribund state of affairs. Boty, in costume as a Dresden shepherdess, naturally caught the public eye. Interviewed by the Daily Express in 1959 she pronounced the Air Ministry ...”

“... in the Garden, ‘Bellow had three sons: Greg, Adam, and Dan. He also had three disciples: James Wood, Leon Wieseltier and Martin Amis.’ Wood, the literary critic and novelist; Wieseltier, the former literary editor of the New Republic; and Amis, who, on the death of his father, Kingsley, declared to Bellow, ‘You’ll ...”

“... Anglo-Irish writers, whose ability to use the English language brilliantly masks an unease’ (Christopher Murray). On the one hand, there is something narrow about the requirement to produce unease as a passport to national identity and, on the other, it seems a poor reading of Incognita and the plays to represent them as serene and secure. The final ...”

“... a special cash award for him, then she put him into the hands of a remarkable agent called Audrey Wood who immediately began nudging him towards fame and fortune. At one stage, esteemed but not yet famous, he was engineered a job as a screenwriter at MGM. They wanted him to fashion what he termed a ‘celluloid brassiere’ for Lana Turner, but he insisted on ...”

“... Rowe in 1709) adds force. The book opens with a brisk pair of essays by David Fallow and Michael Wood on the subject of his parents: John Shakespeare, born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née Arden, some years younger, of a more prosperous family from Wilmcote. Neither of their baptisms is ...”

“... he would enjoy until the end of life. He died there in 1962 of a brain haemorrhage while cutting wood, a month before his 68th birthday. At Harvard he roomed with John Dos Passos and could hardly have had a better time acting as boho, bolshy and radical as Harvard boys of that era were allowed to be, while at that same time calling attention to himself as an ...”