“... left. Best supporting actress, Da’Vine Joy Randolph in The Holdovers; best supporting actor, Robert Downey Jr in Oppenheimer; best actress, Emma Stone in Poor Things; best actor, Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers; best director, Christopher Nolan for Oppenheimer. Best Picture? The word was out before Christmas, it will be Oppenheimer. There’s your big ...”

“... was funded by the military but run by Auer. Siegfried was 45, ambitious for himself and his young family, and this was an opportunity to advance his career. He worked with diphosgene, waste from which was dumped in the river where his children swam. The plant also synthesised diphenyl arsine chloride, a fiendish gas that penetrated ...”

“... the purposes of life now reigns in the thinking stratum of Chinese society, especially among the young. David Rice’s Dragon’s Brood is a marvellously fresh and immediate evocation of this confusion at what one might call the first level of perception – that of the serious visit. Rice is innocent of any real knowledge of Chinese culture or Chinese ...”

“... concern, all of them, and mine especially, for the power in the house is mine.’The anxious young man asserts himself here in a remarkable way. He virtually quotes an earlier hero, and that makes it particularly hard to assess the tone of his speech. In Book 6 of The Iliad Hector told his wife, Andromache, to go back to her weaving and leave war to ...”

“... for the ‘puritanism’ of his judgments, was surely right that the praise lavished on the very young poet had not exactly helped to curb the self-advertising, self-indulgent strain in his writing. Certainly, success came early and came hot. His contributions to Oxford Poetry (in 1929, when he was 20) were singled out for praise by metropolitan ...”

“... what they have increasingly come to regard as an embarrassing anachronism. When the manager Robert Newman and the young Henry Wood inaugurated an eight-week season of Promenade Concerts in 1895, they were not doing anything very novel. Such ‘promenades’ had been a permanent yet ephemeral part of London cultural ...”

“... concedes that his continued abuse of reluctant ‘John’ shows that he did not love him), ‘Robert’ (who recognises the fraudulence of saying that ‘the boys aren’t really hurt’) and Matthew (who is ‘still very disgusted with people who want to have sex with children’) are all described by Dr Li as merely ‘ambivalent’ in ...”

“... rain as ‘grief in arrears’ is the loveliest thing in the book), or the compact subtleties of Robert Crawford, whose short poem ‘Scotland’ is infinitely more subtle and political than the work of Didsbury and McMillan or even Peter Reading. And then the sweet, rapid brocade of Glyn Maxwell’s complex forms, or the grace of Pauline Stainer. These ...”

“... the opposite: it would have been improved by more extravagant invention. The stories of a group of young men who find themselves supervising the transfer of British power in an imaginary West African colony (‘Balunda’) in the Sixties are picked up in the Eighties. They have become recognisable types, but are not distinct or amusing or even grotesque enough ...”

“... were increasingly split by the advance of education between the multiplying numbers of literate young, for whom modernity was the key to social betterment, and the elders, who controlled the institutions of the village community and wanted to hold the outside world at bay – both groups being revolutionary in their different ways. It is that the Russian ...”

“... dread, how about it?’) At the moment, literary Stockholm is abuzz over a stunt pulled by a young poet, whose acclaimed new book has just turned out to be entirely plagiarised from translations of American poets called Robert – Creeley, Mezey, Bly, Lowell, Penn Warren etc. The perpetrator had sent a copy of the book ...”

“... the material that came out of Wales and Ireland, farms and fishing, men’s work with horses. Like Robert Roberts, another recorder of the lives of the poor born at the end of the last century, Evans grew up in a grocer’s shop – not in the classic slum of Salford, but in the mining valley of Abercynon. The children of shopkeepers in poor working-class ...”

“... of sexual impulses, and repressive in its recommendations about how they should be handled in young people, his Emile enjoys a thoroughly undeserved reputation as a liberal educational tract. Emancipated sexual belief gets a better showing when we downgrade a notch, to the realm of the popular and the practically reformist. The awkward case of William ...”

“... with ease – a quality he admired in Romilly? Or was it his fear of death, so intense when he was young and conquered only when he came to die? Or was it some extension of his ego? All novelists are egoists who spin their characters from observing themselves as much as other people and choose subject-matter from their experience. But Philip Toynbee’s ego ...”

“... as the ‘human sciences’, which, simply on the lexical plane, establishes a bridge between the young sociology (for example) and the old, but still valid, Humanities of our grandparents. On the whole, Hexter’s positive assessment of this French superiority (for once!) seems to me pertinent, though pleasantly flattering too to my tricoloured ...”