“... the confidence to write the poems he did? It is impossible to imagine the scion of a distinguished English family using that family now as a basis for poetic composition. But all Lowell’s poems are about being a Lowell, or rather, more specifically, about being this Lowell. Only in the home of democracy, probably, could the personality of the poet as ...”

“... race, amongst us, yet not of us. And the East End produces no type of man or woman so unfit, un-English, and morally and personally so alien as the pauper immigrant.’ Bengali immigrants are thought of as the most impoverished and the most recent arrivals in the East End. In fact, they have been coming here for over two hundred years. Throughout the 19th ...”

“... family life that now brings the shout, ‘Oh, just like the 1950s!’ from visitors to such English seaside resorts as Southwold and Frinton. A few years later, however, we could look into the rear-view mirror and see the 1960s, the Swinging Sixties, unquestionably the most famous ten-year stretch of world history. Yet the 1960s didn’t happen ...”

“... in and around his life, and I mean it in the tradition of comedies like the final episode of Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder, which, after episode upon episode of darlings and foilings and cross-dressings, ends in 1917 with our not exactly heroes climbing out of their trench and running towards the enemy lines. What constitutes the life ...”

“... Ukrainian conflict. ‘I am spelling Kiev and Odessa in the way they have always been spelled in English and don’t feel the need to take what many regard as a political stance by switching to the Ukrainian Kyiv and Odesa,’ Judah reports with some exasperation, in an afterword to his book. Indeed, his assertion that history ‘weighs very heavily on ...”

“... problem. So too, for many, is the God-human thing. That question hasn’t quite gone away – as Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists would like it to – but you don’t get published in philosophy or neurophysiology journals by invoking our unique relationship to a Creator God as a way of accounting for our mental and vital properties. The human-machine ...”

“... of future troubles. A baby brother died when she was six, and within the year another brother, Richard, died from scarlet fever. As Susannah Clapp put it in her review of Fitzgerald’s biography (LRB, 20 December 1984), Mew liked to play the child, but child’s play was always a peculiarly fraught affair. In one poem she addresses Sorrow and remembers ...”

“... This astonishing and brilliant revival of independence and creative energy is the subject of Richard Butterwick’s book. For Catherine, though, as for the Habsburg emperor and the Prussian king, this resurrection was insufferable. In 1795 the armies of all three tramped in to carry out the last of the late 18th-century partitions of the Commonwealth and ...”

“... ago we had Bertrand Russell: The Psychobiography of a Moralist by Andrew Brink, a lecturer in English at McMaster who helped to edit Volumes I and XII of the Collected Papers. This presented a Freudian analysis of the personal papers published in those volumes. Nicholas Griffin’s Russell’s Idealist Apprenticeship has a similar genesis, although in ...”

“... US Embassy, ‘is that there’s lots of money for voter education. The bad news is that we hear Richard Gere and Kim Basinger are coming out to spend it.’ ‘It’s getting like the late Sixties in Vietnam,’ said his colleague. ‘Last time I saw so many people working such frantic hours on politics. Didn’t make a damn bit of difference there in the ...”

“... problems, and apparently Young is one of them. He has sampled a number of prominent contemporary English and American philosophers and dutifully quotes Hare, Davidson, Mackie, Dennett, Ayer and so forth, as well as other, more traditional figures, in order to provide a context for the scientific information. But his comments on what he quotes, and his ...”

“... was nothing. Just ‘Father’, who had no past and who existed only with us and for us. He was English, he was from East London, he had been a student at Queen Mary College at the University of London, he even had the faintest residue of his original London accent, an unreliable cockney ricochet. But the leads stopped there. He never spoke about his ...”

“... a quick look at the new find and declared: ‘No great poet has appeared.’ At Cambridge, Sir Richard Jebb thought that while Bacchylides was no eagle, he ought to be praised as a lively nightingale. ‘Students,’ he added, ‘would find his poetry helpful in facilitating their approach to Pindar.’ Bacchylides had been compared with Pindar from the ...”

“... help us to imagine large spaces. This first version of The Book of Disquiet was translated into English four times in one year: in 1991, by Margaret Jull Costa, Alfred MacAdam, Ian Watson and Richard Zenith. The last of these texts started out as The Book of Disquietude, but the longer word was soon dropped. As Jull Costa ...”

“... satire, masque. Milton studied and reworked the classics as well as Italian poets and contemporary English writers. Again, this wasn’t unusual. Other young scholars at Cambridge – John Cleveland, Richard Crashaw and especially Thomas Randolph – were also writing the sort of poetry expected of promising students. Unlike ...”