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“... felt like twenty years. The reconstruction of reality in short-lived dramatic encounters, or as cross-pollinating conversations through which the protagonists literally talk themselves alive, seems always to have released Cervantes’s best inventions. Much of Don Quixote’s primary quality lies in doubly-generated immortal drivel interrupted by sudden ...”

“... the ‘clearness of style and modesty of temper’ he found in the Anabasis, a judgment that Robin Waterfield’s new translation doesn’t traduce. Xenophon’s relatively simple sentences, preference for the vivid present tense, and use of third-person narration inevitably invite comparison with that other great classical war reporter, Julius ...”

“... Of the two​ folk-myths bound up with Englishness, the myth of St George and the myth of Robin Hood, the myth of St George is simpler. Robin Hood is a process; St George is an event. Robin Hood steals from the rich, which is difficult, to give to the poor, which is trickier still, and has to keep on doing it over and over; but St George kills the dragon, and that’s it ...”

“... moss, of air and of being the youngest of four sisters. In tone, the sequence is something like a cross between Auden’s ‘Academic Graffiti’ and the Private Eye scribbling of E.J. Thribb. Often, the line-breaks are deliberately clunking, as in ‘Aesthetics of the Outdoor Opera’: Sing as loud As you can At the outdoor opera – It will never Be loud ...”

“... more devout than the other novelist); no portrait stamp, no commemorative pillar-box at Waltham Cross. Perhaps the Surtees Society will do something for ‘the novelist who hunted the fox’. It would be a mistake to surmise from this that Trollope’s actual fiction has gone the oblivious way of Surtees’s, or Mrs Oliphant’s or Charles Lever’s. The ...”

“... Joan’s own literary work, both as a Gothic novelist and as a poet, memorably epitomised as ‘a cross between Kahlil Gibran and Rod McKuen’. Extracts from Gothic novels in course of composition pepper the narrative, parodying the genre delightfully but also tracing the author’s growing inability to sublimate her sexual role through fantasies such as ...”

“... thousand men along three hundred and fifty miles of road’. My own first encounter with a working cross – an obviously well-used and discarded specimen – nonetheless came as a shock. One nail remained in the cross-bar and there were still traces of the meagre footrest on which the unfortunate victim would have perched ...”

“... she recommends has important implications: in his biography, Pushkin: The Man and His Age (1994), Robin Edmonds strong-mindedly refrains from even attempting to introduce Pushkin’s poetry to readers who have no Russian, and helpfully fobs us off with the diplomatic and historical background of Pushkin’s life. Feinstein also mentions David Magarshack’s ...”

“... up the now familiar and haunting spectre of urban alienation’. Alison and Peter Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar is a ‘particularly depressing place to live in’, with an ‘almost manic system of walls and moats’, mainly an ‘example of the late modernist avant-garde determination to realise a theoretical position at all costs’. Even ...”

“... that ‘he’s destroying everything now I’ve lived my life for.’ And what was that, exactly? Robin Wood’s book doesn’t live up to the very limited terms of its title, which must have been imposed upon it (since neither Reagan nor Vietnam appear even in the index) by a publisher worried about lack of market appeal. There could be no bolder contrast ...”

“... secrets’ and to ‘hold discussions behind closed doors with its allies or enemies’. Many cross-channel differences that remain the stuff of platitudes are disappearing, but there’s a clue here to one that hasn’t gone away. French opinion is uncertain about white knights like Julian Assange, and still slow to pick up the language of rights, as ...”

“... and laws make life harder, and harder is everything. ‘Being tough and traditional is a heavy cross to bear,’ he once told a reporter. ‘Duresse oblige.’ That, and not fidelity to the text or conservatism as it is usually understood, is the idée fixe of Scalia’s jurisprudence. In an age when the left lacks certainty and will, it can be a potent ...”

“... collaborator Michael Questier (a team recently described by a witty Jesuit as ‘the Batman and Robin of Elizabethan and Jacobean religious studies’) extended their reading to the contemporary accounts of Catholic traitors/martyrs, in prison and on the scaffold (and it is here that ‘Robin’, an authority on ...”

“... Roman worker, heaven mainly means not having to graft, and there’s the bonus of free food – a cross between communion wafers and panettone, his ‘ppandescèlo’ probably a nod to the ‘pan de li angeli’ in Dante’s Paradiso. With Dante, though, it’s a different story. In the first canto of this third part of his Commedia, he links the words valor ...”

“... application, preparing his own versions for a choir in Edinburgh especially to bring out the cross-rhythmic life of the lines. This informed advocacy precedes his only real deaf spot, a blankness towards the entire epoch of seconda prattica emanating from Monteverdi, so out of tune with its present-day status as to be quite disconcerting. Again and again ...”