“... the Tom and Viv bits which we are all likely to home in on.’ In 2022, with the second volume of Robert Crawford’s sensitive biography, it’s the Tom and Em bits.This is unfortunate: Eliot after ‘The Waste Land’ is a rich study of the period from 1922 until Eliot’s death in 1965 – years that contained much besides a complicated love ...”

“... source of a quotation. Smiling, the boy fell dead. Mr Usborne, really! I thought everyone knew Robert Browning’s poem ‘An Incident in the French Camp’. Young lieutenant comes to Napoleon with the news that they have taken Ratisbon. Napoleon quite pleased. He notices that the young man isn’t looking quite himself. ‘You’re ...”

“... gets her hair and nails done at Madame Cleo’s. She does not see what the women of Hasnapur, who may be old at 22, know: that there are no insides and no outsides. These Americans come from a place where ‘the language you speak is what you are.’ Darrel, the pig-farmer who has named his dog Shadow, asks Jane to come up with a pretty name for the golf club ...”

“... No, what scotched the Disraelian legend as serious history was the standard biography by Robert Blake in 1966. Lord Blake possesses unimpeachable credentials as the eminent chronicler of the evolution of the Conservative Party. But he maintains also irreproachable standards as an academic historian, and these made his Disraeli disconcerting reading ...”

“... He established a JDL fund in Evans’s name that continued to exist into the Seventies. It may well be that Kahane’s present obsession with Arab men having sexual relations with Jewish women and his proposal of Nuremberg-style racial purity laws for Israel are at least in part a consequence of his guilt over the Evans tragedy. The attention Friedman ...”

“... of the Opposition whom it was rumoured might have been done away with by the KGB. James Bond may have come about as a defence mechanism, a charm against the way of life Fleming saw himself threatened with after his marriage; rather in the same way that Kenneth Grahame produced another potent bachelor fantasy, The Wind in the Willows, when he found ...”

“... museum contain the Holocaust only by labelling it ‘history’, a series of past crimes that we may now observe from a safe distance? What if we were to object that the Holocaust was not ‘history’? Should we then demand its removal from the sanitising grip of the museum? What, in short, belongs in a museum? On this side of the Atlantic, displays of ...”

“... taxonomy, though anything but new, is stated with new clarity and order. Jargon from any source may be found in one of three forms: shop talk, show talk, and sales talk. The historical passage of a word or phrase from restricted exactitude, through metaphor to common language, and then, as jargon, to a death by evacuation of meaning will he shown by the ...”

“... me, but in the end he will bore me merely, I know.’ (The editorial note says that ‘Hilda’ may have been Hilda Doolittle – the poet H.D. I doubt it.) Lawrence’s answer to Forster’s question – ‘how do you know I’m not dead?’ – hasn’t survived. There is more in Forster ‘than ever comes out’, he told Russell, ‘but he is not dead ...”

“... that some of us have come to expect and delight in, it provides others that many readers may well prefer. And after all the signs were always there, if we had cared to look. Rereading in The Occasions of Poetry Gunn’s essay on Ben Jonson, one notices for the first time how difficult he finds it to enter into Jonson’s world. The difficulties can ...”

“... and nothing at all about the antagonism that at times should have dominated his awareness: that of Robert Falcon Scott towards Gran himself. Perhaps during the expedition Gran unconsciously censored that awareness, or perhaps in his youthful naivety he did not even have it. Gran at 21 was the youngest man to join the expedition. The great polar traveller ...”

“... of sombre majesty. Yet it seems to me substantially a failure or a defeat. Some of the reasons may perhaps be glimpsed in what the novelist said to Jonathan Raban (the New Review, 1974): I believe that this charade-quality of society has been present since the 18th century. Ever since society has been so poised on the cataclysmic edges, there’s been a ...”

“... South African half of the book I cannot pronounce. Passages of untranslated Afrikaans in the text may stop many readers getting to the comparative note at the end. What Dr Norman gets wrong may seem small from a distance – like Papal homilies, such errors would be much harder to tolerate nearer home – and he gets some ...”

“... in the limited sense of the person who put the words on the page.’ Abominating what we may call the ‘ET’ heresy (Extra-Textuality), our authors (or should we say abstractions?) flee the referent for the signifier, and embark upon their philological odyssey through the ‘texts’. The ‘author’, once patriarch of literary property, having ...”

“... attitudes to laughter for more than fifty years, and his book is clearly a labour of love. So, he may appreciate a further example, from the Qumran scrolls outlining the regulations of the Essene community not long before the time of Christ. Members of the community were required to ‘do penance’ for particular lengths of time, depending on their ...”