“... of the shifts and retractions she comments on.) Several faculty members (including Daniel Bell and Peter Gay) left Columbia because of the student uprising and the generally benign faculty response to it, while the Congress for Cultural Freedom sputtered on for I don’t know how long. Most of the ‘liberal anti-Communists’ of the Fifties and Sixties soon ...”

“... the ramifications and interrelations of the European secret police . . . Listening to him was like reading a Russian novel.’ Mary Jayne Gold, a contributor to the Committee, was a bit shocked that both Breton and Serge ‘had almost courtly old-school manners . . . so ancien régime’. Lévi-Strauss, meeting him afterwards on the Capitaine Paul ...”

“... Whether they intervened or not, the text is a long way from the original version of Pamela; reading this polished and sometimes decorous narrative, it is hard for the modern reader to see why it ever had such an impact. During Richardson’s lifetime, it had already gone through many revisions. As its printer, Pamela’s author was in an unusually good ...”

“... Knussen recognised the affinity, and coupled poems by Trakl and Plath in his Second Symphony, and Peter Maxwell Davies has also set Trakl to music. This new collection is the most substantial so far published in England, and should finally win Trakl wider recognition. Alexander Stillmark’s selection of around 125 poems, including most of the major ones, is ...”

“... and every poem. Some thirty unfinished poems, published after his death, are also very much worth reading, but are not included in either edition. Cavafy said that his poems fell into three categories: poems which are not precisely ‘philosophical’ but provoke thought; historical poems; and hedonistic or aesthetic poems. The first tend to be didactic, the ...”

“... to think of Princess Diana, who, allowing for weight and age, triggers many of the same responses. Reading about the huge crowds that sang the Claimant to Newgate and greeted him on his release and crowded into Paddington Cemetery for his pauper’s funeral, one cannot help thinking of that eerie wail that ran along the waiting crowds as Diana’s funeral ...”

“... outright mimicry further dissolve the boundaries between these killers. Jack Owen Spillman began reading about Bundy when he moved to Tacoma as a boy, and later adopted him as a role model. With so many of them in business at the same time, it became hard for investigators to be sure which butcher was responsible for which newly discovered corpse, and in ...”

“... Labour Party figures. One of these pieces had come in and been edited by Mary-Kay, and Karl was reading it in proof. ‘Johnson is like some beast from the pampas,’ Karl said, admiringly and amusedly, ‘who’s brought in, and immediately rushes around butting everybody.’ No such animal is known to zoology, and Bill Johnson has no known connection with ...”

“... in static numerical patterns. This concentration, however, is the quality we consume in our unique reading, and which has no real equivalent in The Tin Drum, say, or Gravity’s Rainbow, or Midnight’s Children, even though their momentum is analogous, as are the associations from which their episodes are constructed. We have no ready-made literary-technical ...”

“... of its politics and examines its weaknesses. Both books will be painful and often infuriating reading for anyone who was at all sympathetic to these politics, but Jones has the harder task: to assess the failure of a project he championed, in which he was a significant player, and which depended on the work and was damaged by the flaws of people he is ...”

“... knowing even the most elementary facts about the intelligence services their taxes pay for. The Peter Wright trial in Australia has recently brought out the full absurdity of this, with Sir Robert Armstrong attempting at one point to suggest that the very existence of MI5 and MI6 (let alone the identity of their directors) was a secret which could neither ...”

“... bodies could not be reassembled, bones picked from the mud. ‘The government of the time,’ Peter Ashley wrote in his English Heritage booklet, Lest We Forget (2004), ‘refused to acknowledge the concept of the repatriation of the dead, so these monuments became the focal points for grief.’ The fallen of King’s Cross are uniformly capitalised: a ...”

“... the actor is the same, Rudolf Klein-Rogge.By 1933 Lang had made his first sound film, M, with Peter Lorre as the child murderer who is caught and tried by criminals rather than cops: the trouble he is causing is bad for business, and the criminals are also full of moral indignation. The film’s original title was Murderer among Us, and the story goes ...”

“... Bailey’s England, First and Last is a book for future social historians as well as nostalgic reading for his contemporaries. Nine years younger, I grew up in what used to be Surrey, and Bailey’s evocation of the minutiae of post-war life in the Home Counties gives me a not wholly pleasant feeling of being sucked back into my own childhood. Windfall ...”

“... his life to maim//Himself somehow for the job,’ he wrote in a posthumous address to the painter Peter Lanyon. Apart from a brief and incongruous spell as an advertising copywriter and the occasional stint on fishing boats, he refused to succumb to the distraction of a day job; he didn’t write reviews or journalism; and as his books of verse were very far ...”