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“... her much better than we really did. John Lehmann, writing of his early meetings with the young Stephen Spender, described Spender as ‘the most rapidly self-revealing person I had ever met’. Something of the sort might be said about Stevie: but one was simultaneously aware of a great deal that was not revealed, and never would be. The public manner (at ...”

“... the ethics of fright. For war, if it comes, will not be like Vietnam. It will be short and sharp; and there is no guarantee that poetic justice will follow. A merely prudential opposition to the war will not survive a triumph, any more than handwringing about its legality a UN figleaf. Assorted justices and lawyers who now cavil at the upcoming ...”

“... controversy; ‘’Tis enough if I divide the world,’ he told his apprehensive Yorkshire friend Stephen Croft. This interweaving of life and fiction during Sterne’s last years is a godsend to the literary biographer. Yet there remains a big problem: what to do with all those years of obscurity. Ross’s major predecessor as a Sterne biographer, Arthur ...”

“... their contents belongs to the reader. The moral attitudes prevalent in these two schools are in sharp contrast to one another. Hirsch, like an upright customs official, writes of the ‘vocation’ of the interpreter and the duty of ethical probity that goes with it. The deconstructionist, more often than not, is a self-conscious outlaw. Thomas Docherty in ...”

“... norms’ of an earlier era) as well as appealing to young American ‘revisionist’ scholars like Stephen Cohen, who wanted to decouple Leninism and Stalinism in order to rescue the former from the stigma of ‘totalitarianism’. Lewin’s next book, dauntingly entitled Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates, had Nikolai Bukharin – the doomed ...”

“... is on Lucian as littérateur, cynical debunker, author of bijou mash-ups of literary history. His sharp introduction tells us about Lucian’s educational background, his cultural context, his language and style, and his relationship to literary models. This is Lucian the bookish intellectual, not the blaspheming ridiculer of religions. Included here are The ...”

“... generation of white abolitionists understood slavery as an offence against God. For Granville Sharp, it was a sin of the enslavers, not simply a misfortune for the enslaved, and the ‘great share of this enormous guilt’ rested with Britain. ‘A toleration of slavery,’ he wrote in 1769, ‘is a toleration of inhumanity.’ If Britons wished to avert ...”

“... but is there a better way to synthesise the taste of sudden freedom than bashing down a barrier? Stephen Kotkin, the co-author of Uncivil Society, observes rather biliously that ‘the books on Communism’s demise in Eastern Europe in 1989 could probably be piled longer and higher than the old Berlin Wall.’ But then he cheers himself up. ‘What more ...”

“... of processes of revision and a sensitivity to Wordsworth’s allusiveness: he is particularly sharp on Wordsworth’s uses of Milton. He also stops to pursue other more contextual investigations. Wordsworth’s remark in The Prelude that he abstained from ‘dissolute pleasure’ while an undergraduate sends Johnston off to find out about prostitution and ...”

“... and Black Triangle.Pring’s book memorialises some of the lives lost. On a university visit, Stephen Carré buys ‘a large, beautiful bear’ for his older sister. Aged seven, Jodey Whiting brings a stray goat back to her grandmother’s house, insisting she wants to adopt it. Errol Graham works on his ‘prized black Mongoose mountain bike, building it ...”

“... What​ became of his face? In his memorial address Stephen Spender, who had known Auden since they were undergraduates, contrasted the young man, Nordic and brilliant, with a ‘second image of Wystan … of course one with which you are all familiar: the famous poet with the face like a map of physical geography, criss-crossed and river-run and creased with lines ...”

“... rhythmic Richmond Lattimore with a lengthy new introduction;* and three hardback copies of the new Stephen Mitchell translation, with refulgent golden shields on the cover and several endorsements on the back, of which the most arresting is by Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget: ‘The poetry rocks and has a macho cast to it, like rap music.’ There ...”

“... another 1938 recording, could be his warning to all songwriters. His ad libs can be funny and sharp social commentary, too, as in his apostrophe to an otherwise pretty gal, ‘Your Feet’s Too Big’ (1939), when Waller adds, grandly, at the end, ‘Your pedal extremities really are obnoxious.’ His is the compensatory pomposity of ...”

“... of themselves. Where women are incidental to the main drive of a story, Kelman is still capable of sharp, affectionate observations of the sort that feministically correct attitudes all too often suppress: ‘But they obviously didnt know this lassie who was a warrior, a fucking warrior. She quite liked wearing short miniskirts but only to suit herself. If she ...”

“... word ‘correct’ infecting the harder-line analyses. Writing to Virginia Woolf in 1937, Stephen Spender gave his unvarnished view of the Brigade: ‘The qualities required, apart from courage, are terrific narrowness and a religious dogmatism ... or else toughness, cynicism and insensibility ... the truthful live in Hell there.’ Everything people ...”