“... remarkable. The original text says, ‘Il y a beaucoup de hasard en tout ceci,’ and we get to read, in the different translations I will describe in a moment:There is a large element of chance in these matters. [Terence Kilmartin]Chance plays a large part in all of this. [James Grieve]There is a great deal of chance in all this. [Lydia Davis]There is a ...”

“... as alien. The literary case Heller-Roazen privileges above all others is Adelbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl, the plebeian Faust who sold his shadow to the devil for magical gifts quickly squandered and so lost his ‘human belonging’, as Thomas Mann put it. Here the Latin adage nomen omen has an ironic twist, for Chamisso thought Schlemihl meant ...”

“... the treaty bound the sovereigns not only to one another but also to those they ruled. It could be read not only as a private agreement between monarchs but as a public commitment to constitutional and international reform. Nakhimovsky shows that networks of largely Protestant republicans and reformers engaged in elaborate interpretations of the Holy ...”

“... towards the end of his life. I’ve never felt the need for a biography. And now that I’ve read this one by Mariani, a serial biographer of poets (he has notched already, among Americans, Williams, Crane, Lowell and Berryman), I don’t feel much the better for it. I got more, qua biography, from the bare bones of the 11-page chronology in the Library ...”

“... things the Saviour said or should have said – dense admonishments in nail polish too small to be read. No surface, she observes, ever seems equal to the psychic needs of those who create such crude and disquieting things: Their purpose wraps around the back of things and under arms; they gouge and hatch and glue on charms till likeable materials – apple ...”

“... more polite and discussable aspects of Eliot as a person who had, for example, thought a bit and read a bit. Some writers tried, as Eliot himself never did, to work his critical observations up into a coherent theory; others, like Grover Smith, read what he had read, so far as this could ...”

“... let’s have us honey –‘It set the prosodic pattern,’ Berryman told the interviewer, Peter Stitt, who had been a student of his a few years earlier. The interview was conducted in a ward in St Mary’s Hospital in Minneapolis, where Berryman seemed to be comfortable. He spent quite a bit of time there during the last few years of his life. In ...”

“... must not be called in half-way through’), and a passion for English literature. The books she read with the inner group allowed for a certain release of emotion – in fact, for Miss Harrison’s soppy side: the Brownings, the Brontës, Alice Meynell, Francis Thompson, Tagore’s ‘King of the Dark Chamber’ and ‘The Post Office’. When Charlotte Mew ...”

“... the constraints placed on Andrew, though not apparently on his opinions, we’re almost bound to read it more critically – even the non-conspiracy theorists among us – than we do most history books. One problem is that we can’t check anything, since most of the primary sources are listed simply as ‘security service archives’, with no further ...”

“... Puzo, Friedman, Brooks and the screenwriter David Zelag Goodman. Kurt Vonnegut began to show up. Peter Matthiessen was considered but rejected for mentioning too often his membership in the Institute of Arts and Letters. ‘It’s an organisation,’ Puzo said, ‘for guys who can’t get screen deals.’ Barring Vogel, the core members all got screen ...”

“... that was the secret of its ‘genius’. Philosophers were crazy for it too. Wittgenstein, who had read it ‘an extraordinary number of times’, went around quoting bits to friends. Heidegger kept a portrait of Dostoevsky on his desk; Nietzsche called him ‘the only psychologist from whom I had anything to learn’. What most novelists would pay for blurbs ...”

“... his novel set in 18th-century Naples. In Les Trois Femmes de ma vie the young Dominique listens to Peter Pears singing Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo in a booth at the HMV shop on Oxford Street, with a thrilled sense of eavesdropping on two levels of erotic complicity, not only between Michelangelo and his beloved but also between singer and ...”

“... others, Eric Griffiths. In an essay included in Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work (1985, edited by Peter Robinson), Griffiths expressed reservations about Hill’s ‘unsteady reliance on religious metaphors’ in his critical writings. In Hill’s essay ‘Poetry as “Menace” and “Atonement” ’ in particular, the idea that poetic language may escape ...”

“... in 1985) offers little more than a glimpse of a lifetime of painstaking research on Ruskin. Peter Fuller’s provocative Theoria was not a university product. There is no shared perspective in these books. Hewison and Fuller, Ruskin’s most polemical advocates, have made incompatible political claims for his thought. What they do have in common is a ...”

“... Pritchett merely plunges into him. But if the intellectual classes no longer know how to read a man of letters, and sad as this may be it is probably true, there would be no better way of rediscovering the art than through these essays. Their variety is huge and their range encyclopedic. Nor do they offer the slightest evidence anywhere of those ...”