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“... My acceptance of an offer to review the Kavanagh book landed me in a mess of puzzles. Peter Kavanagh, the poet’s brother, starts straight off, sentence one, by announcing: ‘When I write about Patrick Kavanagh I write as a partisan, as his alter ego, almost as his evangelist.’ And if you think that’s a dubious basis for a biography, what about this? As far as possible I shall avoid writing of him as a brother since my interest in him was mainly as a poet ...”

“... The fox on the cover of this issue is walking past Peter Campbell’s house in South London, the house (he wrote about it in the LRB in September) where he and his wife had lived since 1963. Peter died – in that house – on 25 October and the picture on the cover is the last one he painted ...”

“... to Sydney’s inner-city slums. ‘Aborigines were not a racial problem but a social one,’ Read glosses the Foundation’s non-threatening message. Perkins told one suburban audience in 1964 that it was time Aborigines rid themselves of welfare dependency ‘and started doing something about our problem ourselves’. ...”

“... their radio programmes were broadcast from, what comic books their children (no doubt secretly) read, what cars they drove, what cinemas they queued at, The omnivorousness of the show serves painting least well. Sickert’s Edward VIII – painted from a photograph – establishes forward connections with made-image users of the last twenty years and ...”

“... Peter Reading, 1946-2011) ‘The only permanence I suppose is in having been’ –                     thus           in four words             conjugating present and past         that one may say ‘has been’       drunk and (I guess, not having seen it) sober             a half century at words for animals, people, plants the planet ...”

“... selection of ‘The Artist Waiting in a Country House’, a sophisticated meditative poem to be read alongside James Fenton’s ‘A Vacant Possession’. The title poem of St Kilda’s Parliament two years later set the tone for another politically conscious and responsible collection. The poem ‘returns’ to a photograph taken of the men of St Kilda in ...”

“... Till recently, I’ve dodged most of Peter Reading’s work. He seemed so much the darling of the TLS and of a metropolitan circle whose powerfully disseminated views it is often essential to evade in the interests of finding a position which affords a degree of independence. Seeing stray poems by him in magazines, I thought of him as having a gift of designer outrage, whose appeal to the sophisticated might be suspect ...”

“... they intended to find. Though he doesn’t mention Rosenberg, or any other critic for that matter, Peter Conrad, Fellow of Christ Church, Oxford, is convinced that a similar destiny was in store for the English writers of the 19th and 20th centuries who ‘imagined’ America during their visits to it. They imagined it not freely but in obedience to various ...”

“... the exilic corpus as entitled to the same degree of scholarly attention as Ovid’s earlier work. Peter Green was in at the beginning of the boom when he published his spirited and sympathetic translation in 1994, now reissued with a new foreword and updated bibliography; any quotations from Ovid in this piece are taken from his excellent versions. Green ...”

“... were some kind of a solution But wouldn’t risk their legendary horses, Battle wagons: they’d read about pollution, High-rise slums and poisoned watercourses. To keep their army healthy they ran races On plains and let our cameramen record them – Nightly the same professional drained faces Fronted clips on TV and deplored them. Their Great Khan ...”

“... in the Royal Collection: Renaissance and Baroque. They include the Caravaggio Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew, the two Tintorettos (Esther before Ahasuerus and The Muses) and the two Bassanos (The Adoration of the Shepherds and The Journey of Jacob); the Lovers attributed to Titian, the Correggio Holy Family, the Bronzino Portrait of a Lady in Green, the ...”

“... British Constitution’). But this constitution wasn’t written down, so you couldn’t read it, use it, study it or be sure exactly what was in it. But you could feel very, very proud of it. One can imagine the general hilarity which would greet the claim by, say, the ruler of Uganda that his country had a constitution, but that it existed only in ...”

“... Peter Vansittart, novelist, historian and writer for children, has been singled out for praise by critics as diverse as Philip Toynbee, Francis King, Angus Wilson and Andrew Sinclair. All feel that he lacks the large audience he deserves. Yet the curious reader, anxious to gain more information about this somewhat enigmatic writer, of undoubted power (and above all vision), may easily find himself defeated ...”

“... as through grammar and the translation of set phrases.The boys and the few girls who learned to read, write and speak Latin often received an education in drama along the way. The plays of Terence were a mainstay of education in ancient Rome thanks to his exemplary style. Medieval and early modern teachers recognised their pedagogical potential and used ...”

“... is not), but chooses not to call it anything. The rest is inference. For literary usage, we can read literature (or the 5 per cent of it that survives). For the usages of speech, we rely on contemporary trivia and philological longevity. Colloquial Latin shows up in the graffiti which Vesuvius baked on the walls of Pompeii, in the lead bullets that the ...”