“... at the top of their power. They stood for pain. The stone on my other side was in memory of ‘Frank Cyril Nicholson, who died January 13th 1897, aged 14 years’. It was a cool day, very quiet at times, then some horn or deep engine on the dual carriageway would break in. Frank Cyril died after 14 years; died, it ...”

“... a full-time writer in 1987; about his several extended visits to the United States; about his close friendship and rivalry with Malcolm Bradbury; about the onset of deafness in late middle age; and about much, much more besides. Lodge said in a recent interview that the idea of his writing an autobiography had been suggested by a reader of Lives in ...”

“... sojourn, had time to cultivate dangerous right-wing revolutionaries in Sydney and form a close association with a quasi-fascist Leader, when he was sitting hour after hour in his seaside bungalow (‘Wyewurk’) and dashing off Kangaroo, a hefty novel, in six weeks. As Shakespeare’s Cleopatra remarks, ‘Celerity is never more admired/Than by the ...”

“... Much later she admired Britten, who set some of her poems, and in the days of their widowhood grew close to Peter Pears. She knew Vaughan Williams (detecting a physical resemblance to T.F. Powys, also to Arthur Machen) and records a significant conversation she had with him while his wife and Gerald Finzi’s were buying things in Valentine Ackland’s antique ...”

“... On the books generally accepted as the major novels Burgess, though fresh and accurate, hews close enough to the standard judgments. Elsewhere he gives more weight to preference and prejudice. Aaron’s Rod fails to interest him (‘a loose improvisation of which not much need be said’), though Kangaroo, also a loose, hasty improvisation and also a ...”

“... as closest to Shakespeare’s autograph. The view now taken is that Q2 represents a draft, quite close to final but later revised for performance, so that the differences between Q2 and F, which are considerable, ought usually to be resolved in favour of F. The texts of the play most of us grew up with tend to insert bits of F into Q2, so providing a ...”

“... The opening six-line stanza sets the arbitrary pattern of line length and rhyme, and has a full close: Dürer would have seen a reason for living in a town like this, with eight stranded whales to look at, with the sweet sea air coming into your house on a fine day, from water etched with waves as formal as the scales on a fish (Dürer because he ...”

“... aspirations. James’s politics are now a popular theme with literary historians, almost as if the close relation of Shakespeare’s company to the court (they were, after all, the King’s Men) had suddenly been revealed to scholars who, unlike their predecessors, understand how important it was. They somehow fail to ask the obvious question: whether the ...”

“... The Jerusalem variety, which was controlled by a brother of Jesus, remained in many ways close to Judaism, while the energetic Paul opened up the new religion to Gentiles, even if they failed to practise circumcision and observe dietary laws. The Greek of these Jews was what modern scholars, at ease with Plato and Sophocles, loftily call ...”

“... coup de théâtre a trusted uncle turns out to be the head of an opium smuggling organisation. A close childhood friend, now a wounded soldier in the invading army, is met and cared for. Since the climax of the action occurs during the Kuomintang defence of Shanghai some rather specific accounts of the fighting are called for. Nevertheless, Banks, the ...”

“... I haven’heard. He is Daron Aric Hagen, and Shining Brow is an opera about the early life of Frank Lloyd Wright, commissioned by Madison Opera, Wisconsin, Wright’s home state. The work was premièred there in April, but not having heard it, I cannot speak for the opera’s music. That, though, would not appear to be much of a drawback. Muldoon’s text ...”

“... New York, he starts getting anonymous telephone calls; well, not quite anonymous: ‘Just call me Frank.’ Frank also says, ‘I’m the guy whose life you fucked up,’ and he regularly taunts Self for his drunkenness and gluttony. He berates him, too, for his attitudes to women: at one point, he sends him a present ...”

“... stooge, Harriet Smith. Few uninformed readers, however, will grasp from the first what Frank Churchill is up to as he appears to flirt with Emma – how his very appearance in Highbury, after years of good excuses to his father, is tied to the arrival of Jane Fairfax at her aunt’s cramped home in the village. The delight of his scheming is ...”

“... and one sympathiser (Geoffrey Hartman), two politically-minded oppositional critics (Edward Said, Frank Lentricchia) and two unclassifiable individualists (Harold Bloom, Frank Kermode). The ninth interviewee is the daddy of academic critics, the man with whom ‘we enter the critical modern age, the era of the total ...”

“... is unmasked he should turn out to be ... other critics. The first to be identified is our own Frank Kermode, whose argument in his 1973 Eliot lectures, The Classic, is in two sentences of the second lecture neatly travestied and so dismissed. He survives to fight another day, as we shall see. The next antagonist, in a third lecture called ‘Shakespeare ...”