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“... stood, deciding by the last page that the author was the man she was put on earth to marry. George Barker. His name seems almost seedy now, redolent of multiple fatherings and free drinks and Benzedrine, a low-rent Catholic visionary forever caught in some personal smog of Latinate rhetoric and English ambition. But at the time of Elizabeth Smart’s first ...”

“... The plural title of Life Stories is paradoxical. The short story – Barker’s preferred literary form – cannot comprehend anything as large as life. In the face of this paradox, she has devised a new kind of cycle. Instead of the traditional bonding of carried-over place or character, Barker has abstracted items from various stages of her writing career, beginning with the opening piece in her first collection, Innocents (1947 ...”

“... been one of its major causes. The next government to attempt a poll tax was Thatcher’s. Juliet Barker has written a splendid account of the events of 1381 and their wider context, enlivened with many arresting anecdotes. There is the rebel who ran his sword into the royal bed in the Tower of London, saying he would like to do the same to the traitors ...”

“... that is good,’ Robert Southey wrote (the declaration is emblazoned on the dust-jacket of Juliet Barker’s new Life). Yet any sense of this – of the subtle, elementary qualities of Wordsworth’s verse – is rarely apparent to those who study him, and rarely apparent in the throng of books and articles and theses that continue to be devoted to him. The ...”

“... although the theatre enjoyed at least as luminous a period from 1904 to 1907 when Harley Granville-Barker was its artistic director. The Royal Court is the perfect size for a playhouse; it seats about four hundred people (two hundred fewer than in Granville-Barker’s day), it has perfect acoustics (if one can ignore the ...”

“... I remark that Dr Lennard doesn’t know how to spell either John Livingston Lowes or Nicolas Barker (neither in any way an ass and each a famous pons asinorum); and that Dr Lennard should be ashamed of himself for having such truck with the vogue/vague words resonance, deflate, undercut, undermine, ironise, and even – grimly inescapable these days ...”

“... speaking very much as she finds is what we are given in Elaine Feinstein’s All you need and A.L. Barker’s The woman who talked to herself, two lovely, sly, sad, comic accounts of depressed housewifery. Feinstein’s story is the triumphant tale of Nell Bolton – ‘Little Nell’ to those who do not really know her, meaning her closest friends and ...”

“... New Apocalypse gets a mention, though none of its poets rates an individual entry unless, like Barker and Watkins, they made it elsewhere on their own. Poetry London, the only magazine to which I ever subscribed without receiving a single copy, is dignified by inclusion, and even gets more space than Horizon, though much less than Scrutiny. I suppose ...”

“... new biography since Lyndall Gordon’s Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life in 1994 and Juliet Barker’s The Brontës from the same year (biographies seem to come in generational bursts). All writers on the Brontës now benefit from Margaret Smith’s magisterial – much overdue – edition of Charlotte’s extant letters, published by Oxford in three ...”

“... When the King’s printer Robert Barker produced a new edition of the King James Bible in 1631, he overlooked three letters from the seventh commandment, producing the startling injunction: ‘Thou shalt commit adultery.’ Barker was fined £300, and spent the rest of his life in debtors’ prison, even while his name remained on imprints ...”

“... our brightest young writers. The anthology may not begin with ‘Sunday Morning’, but Jonathan Barker suggests that Ron Butlin, James Lasdun, Oliver Reynolds and other talents have been influenced, like Vendler’s Americans, by the world of Canon Aspirin. This seems doubtful. To read the PBS volume after the Faber Book is to be almost crushed by the ...”

“... suggest that even the shock of world war is insufficient to explain such a widespread phenomenon. Christopher Thorne’s The Issue of War is a brave and immensely erudite attempt to consider the effects of the Allied-Japanese war of 1941-1945 on all the societies involved, including New Zealand’s. One point that emerges unquestionably is that the failure of ...”

“... researching his part in a semi-amateur production of Twelfth Night reads in ‘good old Granville-Barker’: ‘Feste, I feel, is not a young man … There runs through all he says and does that vein of irony by which we may so often mark one of life’s self-acknowledged failures … a man of parts without character and with more wit than sense.’ The actor ...”

“... to believe that Wolfe hasn’t read of Wilde’s most laboured joke about Nell.) The carnival barker sweeps off his rakish and jaunty panama: ‘If you won’t weep for Hecuba, surely you’ll shed a tear for Mister Dickens here. Roll up, you fine ladies and gentleman, for Lord Jeffrey, known to one and all as “The Impeccable!” Snuffle away ...”

“... capacities; in particular, concepts are epistemic capacities, abilities to recognise or to infer. Christopher Peacocke’s A Study of Concepts is about as subtle and sophisticated an elaboration of the idea that concepts are epistemic capacities as you will ever want to read. It may, in fact, be a more subtle and sophisticated elaboration of that idea than ...”