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“... contrast the two books’ treatment of the 14th-century palace of the Alhambra, outside Granada. Bloom and Blair’s prose is Baedekerish and, save for the occasional adjective of approbation, tends to shun value judgments in favour of a positivistic catalogue of what there is to be seen. Hillenbrand’s account not only describes what was there, but also ...”

“... that are the active principle of the rhetoric of the discourse that the analysand in fact utters? Jonathan Culler also, when he comes to treat of the arch-deconstructivist Jacques Derrida, finds himself constrained to adopt a ‘double strategy’ in order to describe, without misrepresenting, Derrida’s work. ‘Even the most subtle and scrupulous ...”

“... Jonathan Meades​ is the Jonathan Meades of our generation,’ reads a puff-quote by the late A.A. Gill on the cover of Meades’s new cookbook, The Plagiarist in the Kitchen (Unbound, £20), but it’s hard to think of any patch less in need of a Jonathan Meades than English food writing ...”

“... Early experiments had been conducted on chimpanzees, but that was expensive.Professor Arthur Bloom, director of the haemophilia centre at University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff and the UK’s leading specialist, wrote in a letter dated January 1982 that the obvious solution was to test on humans by ‘administering those concentrates to patients not ...”

“... per annum for engraving lessons’). Now that Frye is dead, Blake’s best living critic is Harold Bloom. If Blake’s mental forms had a life before 1757, they also had one after 1827. Arthur Symons saw this: he was interested not only in the figures from the past whom Blake brought back to life, but also in those of the present ...”

“... Leigh Fermor’s memory isn’t wonderful – he has no trouble confounding Joyce’s Leopold Bloom with that character’s father, Rudolph Virag of Szombathely, and he has forgotten to restore to ‘Elias Cavetti’ his proper name, Elias Canetti. Minor details, indeed. As a song of the open road, Between the Woods and the Water is a lively, engaging ...”

“... an obscene self-congratulation for the virtue required to see your mistake and own up to it?’ Jonathan Franzen’s memoir, The Discomfort Zone, is an object lesson in the management of such obscenity. The book begins with a loss. After lengthy treatment for colon cancer, his widowed mother, Irene, has died. The youngest of three brothers who’ve fled the ...”

“... that is, the publicised (tabloidised) dissolution of his marriage to the actress Claire Bloom and the parting kick of her memoir Leaving a Doll’s House (1996), which set a million squinty eyes on him, judging, condemning – how dare this broody brute browbeat Lady Marchmain so? The guilty verdict, a public condemnation based only on her testimony ...”

“... of the French Revolution, and its reputation went into decline as the Revolution lost its youthful bloom; for a while, indeed, it was totally eclipsed by the Romantic reaction with its factitious liking for the Middle Ages. Before long, however, medievalism became a term of ridicule again, and the Enlightenment achieved a spectacular comeback by transforming ...”

“... the key to Renaissance courtly poetry in its strategies for eliciting astonishment. Back home, Jonathan Bate is gobsmacked by the sheer Genius of Shakespeare. It’s perhaps as well to remember that in cooler moments Jonson complained that ‘Shakespeare wanted Art’ and Milton berated Charles I for preferring the Bard to more serious ...”

“... nourishment for writers who seek it out, make it their own, and use it to create something new.Jonathan Bate’s​ How the Classics Made Shakespeare has more modest goals. Bate grants that Shakespeare’s classical influences have often been studied before, but claims that ‘certain aspects of Shakespeare’s classical inheritance have been curiously ...”

“... his day as a pattern, ‘a framework within which happiness could spring into sudden unexpected bloom, like a flower from the bare rock’. Jonathan Hunt, who is at work on a biography of Brooke, argues in his percipient preface to the Penguin edition that, for Brooke’s narrator as a child, the Orchis militaris ‘seems ...”

“... wanted to be its king and drink ‘rapture of rest’. Temperatures avoid extremes; camellias bloom at Christmas. The very competitive mathematician and ocean-wave expert Sir James Lighthill swam the ten miles around Sark five times; on his sixth attempt, in 1998, he ruptured a heart valve. Sark is the world’s first Dark Sky Island, benefiting from an ...”

“... looking for the full range of post-war US poetry will have to turn elsewhere. Sharing Harold Bloom’s commitment to ‘the transcendental strain’, Vendler differs over how we should read it. What she values is less the Sublime than its epistemology. While Bloom cries up the heroic Emersonian in Stevens, Vendler ...”

“... the performances of Leavis, Graham Hough and Cleanth Brooks on ‘Tears, Idle Tears’; and of Jonathan Culler and Terence Hawkes on William Carlos Williams’s ‘This is Just to Say’. Theories of Structuralism make Gribble particularly angry. He quotes a bit from Roland Barthes only to say he finds it impenetrable. A long paragraph from Culler’s ...”