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“... Derek Walcott is now 50 years old, but there is none of the placidity or mellowing of middle age in The Star-Apple Kingdom. If Naipaul is the great novelist of the colonial experience, Walcott has a claim to be considered the great poet of the same experience. They share an acute sense of belonging to more than one culture and hence to none. The reference in the title poem to the Caribbean’s ‘history-orphaned islands’ is a motto for many other poems in Walcott’s new collection ...”

“... dreams, and one rather dogmatic passage laying down the law on dream symbolism. It is a measure of Stephen Brook’s easy-going editorial attitude that Freud and his detractors are given equal house-room. His anthology is, deliberately, a miscellaneous compilation, containing, in addition to passages of the finest writing – the work of ...”

“... for ‘strategic depth’ as an excuse for hanging onto the territories. Schiff and Ya’ari, like Stephen Brook in Winner takes all (a perceptive account of a recent visit to Israel), examine the plight of the Israeli Arabs and the problem posed for Israel by their divided loyalties and the radicalising, Palestinianising effect of the intifada. ‘My ...”

“... Jews than any amount of Rothschild philanthropy or social engineering had ever been able to do. Brook’s volume brings the story up to date, with a readable, irreverent and pessimistic account of contemporary Anglo-Jewry, as seen by someone who belongs to it by birth but rejects many of its values by choice. He begins with an exploration of the religious ...”

“... and contemporary Anglo-Jewry has been more shrewdly, as well as more comprehensively, described by Stephen Brook. There is a need for a book which draws together the separate threads represented by these other studies, but Modern British Jewry is not it. Alderman is unable to place Jews in the context of English society. This inability leads to dangerous ...”

“... by Sedgwick, both called Floating Columns: In the Bardo, were exhibited at Suny Stony Brook and the Cuny Graduate Center. She uses the Tibetan Buddhist term bardo, or the ‘space between states of being’, to signify the ‘painful bardo of dying’, which occupies the ‘space between contracting a terminal illness and death itself’. I did ...”

“... brothers. At the Cliveden swimming-pool Jack met, not for the first time, Astor’s osteopath, Stephen Ward, ‘the Doctor’ of the quadrilateral, and the exceptionally pretty Christine Keeler. Profumo, as he later put it, ‘was extremely taken by Christine, whom I thought was Ward’s girlfriend, but he did not seem to be particularly possessive about ...”

“... his frequent collaborator, the designer Jocelyn Herbert. The nominal producer of The Old Crowd was Stephen Frears, but in real terms it was LWT and its then head of programmes, Michael Grade. Used as I was to the BBC and to my regular producer, Innes Lloyd, I found LWT entirely well-meaning but awkward to work with only because it wasn’t an organisation ...”

“... had himself entertained for a time thoughts of a similar long poem (his was to be called ‘The Brook’), which would have interwoven natural description and metaphysical reflections. Like many of Coleridge’s grandest schemes it came to nothing; but in Wordsworth, he clearly felt, he had found just the man to take over the testing commission. However ...”

“... probably took place to the ridge’s south-west. The water shown here may well be the ‘sandy brook’ that would have given the field the name Senlac, taken by Freeman from the later but richly detailed account of the Anglo-Norman Orderic Vitalis. We may even glimpse the stakes of the defensive ‘palisade’ recorded in the yet later but even richer ...”

“... and sexuality – but race matters most, and anti-racism has become a ‘religion’ that will brook no questioning, shutting down all rational debate. This part of the argument relies more heavily on anecdote, and skips between countries: he repeats Orwell’s well-worn remark that ‘in left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly ...”

“... society whichever government we live under. 20 February, Yorkshire. Via Mallerstang to Kirkby Stephen and Barnard Castle, the tops still veined with snow and in the late afternoon bathed in a rich tawny light, the valleys in shadow with the hills still catching the sun. We have tea at Muker, where we look in the church which is dull and scraped, how dull ...”

“... rhythmic Richmond Lattimore with a lengthy new introduction;* and three hardback copies of the new Stephen Mitchell translation, with refulgent golden shields on the cover and several endorsements on the back, of which the most arresting is by Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget: ‘The poetry rocks and has a macho cast to it, like rap music.’ There ...”

“... writes. Once he was in his late teens, it became fashionable to fall in love with Freud. When Stephen Spender, according to himself, told T.S. Eliot that he had succumbed, Eliot said: ‘There’s nothing I understand more.’ Spender and Freud spent some time in a cottage in Wales when Freud was 18 and produced a little book of drawings and poems ...”

“... I needed to change the character of his performance by restricting its size, as if I was Peter Brook called on to direct Orson Welles or Donald Wolfit (if anyone remembers that name). The obvious priority was getting rid of any possibility of an audience. If it was just the two of us there would be more prospect of damping down his reactions. There was a ...”