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“... logic common to all modern states? At a time when Holocaust history is full of such debates, Christopher Browning provides a desperately needed synthesis. For him, the Holocaust grew out of ideological obsession, was furthered by callous bureaucratic ambition, and realised in technologically sophisticated killing centres, but also in the ...”

“... near the village of Chelmno in Poland. These vehicles were prone to breakdowns, but according to Christopher Browning, the author of The Path to Genocide and an expert witness at the Irving trial, the real problem was with the men. Browning cites a Nazi medical report describing the crews as suffering ‘enormous ...”

“... haven’t mentioned those who made these things happen: the bureaucrats and clerks. Raul Hilberg, Christopher Browning and Claude Lanzmann (among others) have laid their contribution bare: such men did not care to know what they were doing; nevertheless they knew what they had to do and did it – with a dedicated efficiency which usually resulted in ...”

“... against Jews – were the work of ordinary soldiers and police auxiliaries: ‘ordinary men’, as Christopher Browning called them in his 1992 study of one battalion of the Ordnungspolizei. Some military commanders opposed the use of their troops for these purposes, but as Christian Streit and others have shown, the Army was deeply implicated in the war ...”

“... satire towards something also ambiguous, but more complex – to take up the poetic monologue as Browning used it in Men and Women and Dramatis Personae. Not that ‘Spirals’ or ‘The Most Difficult Position’ is doggedly imitative. For one thing, Browning was a more scrupulous, and so perhaps knottier, prosodist than ...”

“... the 19th century as a whole. His major precursors are Quiller-Couch, Yeats, Auden, George MacBeth, Christopher Ricks and Ian Fletcher. I don’t intend a Shopper’s Guide, but I’ll start with two small complaints. Unlike Fletcher, Karlin doesn’t give explanatory notes, except for a few dialect words and phrases in foreign languages. Reading Davidson’s ...”

“... Writing in 1842 to his friend Alfred Domett, who had emigrated to New Zealand, Robert Browning enclosed ‘Tennyson’s new vol. and, alas, the old with it – that is what he calls old’. Browning was referring to the two-volume Poems of 1842, whose first volume consisted of heavily revised versions of poems published in 1830 and 1832 ...”

“... and circumstantial, in Fleming’s book, as well as in recent papers by the American historian Christopher Browning, persuasively suggests a sequential pattern of policy which is virtually impossible to envisage without what would have been tantamount to an initial order from the Führer, no matter how conveyed and to how few. And the evidence is very ...”

“... At the very end of The Ring and the Book Browning delivers one of the most staggering mule-kicks ever meted out by an author to his readers. Bear in mind that the poem is more than 21,000 lines of blank verse – about twice the length of Paradise Lost. It was published in four monthly instalments, each containing three books of the poem, which appeared from November 1868 to February 1869 ...”

“... Nine years ago Herbert Tucker wrote an excellent first book, Browning’s Beginnings; like many first books it gave the impression of being a labour of love. Tucker’s second is a tremendous disappointment. It has all the inflated idea of itself that the title suggests. Browning’s Beginnings was short, keen and suggestive ...”

“... what Moss calls ‘their chums from other disciplines – Clive James, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Christopher Hitchens, Redmond O’Hanlon’. Together, novelists and ‘chums’ are not unlike a coterie of window-cleaners crowded onto a single boatswain’s chair (or rather bench): each time one of them tugs on his rope, they all move a little higher up the ...”

“... Papers makes the most responsible and unexpected use of Emily Brontë and of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But it is Robert Browning who fails to furnish the one thing needed, and this is where the novel fails. The dramatic monologue, after all, grew out of the epistolary novel. Forster is writing essentially an epistolary ...”

“... renounces the world and despises society. Dante scholarship soon began to operate, however, and Browning perceived that the exposition of a serious and complex intellectual theme could be based on Dante’s example and his characters. Sordello, the ideal poet and man of action combined, ‘half minstrel and half emperor’, provides ...”

“... and Gain, to say nothing of Modern Love and The Europeans, and – best of all and best used – Browning’s great poem of comedy and sadness, of hopes dished, ‘Youth and Art’. The allusions are child’s play for homo ludens. It is true that the decision to compile a compendium both does and doesn’t help with Wilson’s notorious difficulty in ...”

“... an occasional session of sweet silent thought, or even to the consulting of a concordance. Robert Browning, Luria, 1846 – I dedicate this last attempt for the present at Dramatic Poetry to a Great Dramatic Poet: ‘Wishing what I write may be read by his light’: if a phrase originally addressed, by not the least worthy of his contemporaries, to ...”