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“... and John Halperin’s The Life of Jane Austen (1984), the work under review is in so many ways the best that it deserves to make its mark. The three authors, moreover, approach their subject (or subjects) from quite different directions and differ greatly in their concepts of literary biography. The biographical study of Jane Austen began in a succession of ...”

“... by reminding ‘you’ of the labelled big toe of a corpse. Fragmentations like these are probably best understood as new techniques Muldoon has discovered for maintaining the tight-wire neutrality on which much of the success of his poetry depends. The faux-naif voice he developed so brilliantly in Mules and Why Brownlee left was a perfect vehicle for the ...”

“... note of grown-up superiority. It is largely by such lofty disengagement that Pope and his best contemporaries were able to take on board both the scurrilities of satire and some of the awkward majesties of the heroic. The increasing attenuation of satire’s primitive aggressions was attended for a time by a corresponding elaboration of formal ...”

“... junked if it were to be made good. With some obviously difficult writers – Henry James, say, or Geoffrey Hill – one has the sense that a tangled world is being masterfully comprehended. With Paterson (as with Browning, the shadowy double who haunts this volume), it seems rather that simplicity is always just beyond him, whether in Scots, or in the ...”

“... History definitively from such monocular histories of French literature as those by Cazamian or Geoffrey Brereton. No one-author history could ever cover so much as does this vast collaboration: the New History tells you more and tells it to you more convincingly. But it is unnecessarily erratic in its mode of address. A very few contributors are ...”

“... tribal scuffle! It seems these hijack chappies hate Nyerere And think that Stansted’s the best place to say it. The SAS are on tap looking scarey, A mighty strong card if we have to play it. As hijacks go, though, this one’s airy-fairy. The price they ask is vague and kind words pay it. Believing that their cause is understood They throw down ...”

“... and when the balance is broken, fascination turns into delight. Great specialist batsmen such as Geoffrey Boycott or Sunil Gavaskar afford endless hours of pleasure to fanatics. The same goes for great specialist bowlers such as Ray Lindwall or Lance Gibbs. Any one of those, and many, many others like them, can break the balance. They do so by steady ...”

“... by its agricultural estates, crammed with furniture, books and paintings from the past and, best of all, still occupied by a descendant of the family which built it. It is this irresistible combination of architectural distinction, aesthetic display and genealogical continuity which has made the English country house so crucial a national icon. In the ...”

“... being shaped under great pressure.’ But what really made me sit up straight was his remark about Geoffrey Hill’s ‘Annunciations’, the last poem in the book: ‘I understand “Annunciations” only in the sense that cats and dogs may be said to understand human conversations (i.e. they grasp something by the tone of the speaking voice), but without ...”

“... of levelling death’; the wonderfully precise Australian John Manifold; and another soldier-poet, Geoffrey Matthews, who ended an ‘Elegiac Sonnet’ of 1943 about flowers at a graveside: . . . For his first low home Pastelled sweet-peas and grass For his green simplicity; And the gay daughter marigold For his sophistication. So he had wished to die ...”

“... celebration indeed was so extensive that Putin must have had difficulty topping it. He did his best, however, laying flowers on a monument to Zhukov in Ulan Bator in May 2009. Comparisons with the great commanders of the Napoleonic Wars, Mikhail Kutuzov and Aleksandr Suvorov, were commonplace. And it wasn’t only Putin and Medvedev who sought to cover ...”

“... Werfel’s way of introducing Nunik offers a flavour of his terrific, all-stops-out style at its best: ‘Nunik held between her hard, stringy thighs a black lamb, no doubt strayed from the herds, and she was slitting its throat open from underneath. It seemed a very workmanlike slit, done with the quietest of hands, while her lips parted under the horrible ...”

“... of 1974 when, for a moment, it looked as if the Liberals might hold the balance of power. In the best of circumstances, it would not have been easy for a new Liberal leader to maintain the momentum that Grimond and Thorpe had given the Party. But the tangled web that led to Thorpe’s disgrace and departure, and then to a bitter contest for the succession ...”

“... a man who should have been shot. But those are the carpings of jealous men. Knightley has done his best to filter the new information, which incidentally does not greatly enlarge the sum of human knowledge about the broad story of the Cambridge spies. He has not been taken for a ride: rather, he provides a treasury of personal detail, not least about ...”

“... with her earlier life. He knows her handsome brother Jeremy, currently up at Magdalen. His best friend, John ‘Pimlico’ Price, a manufacturer of sweets, is an acquaintance of her former lover, Geoffrey. Theo seems to go out of his way to throw Evelyn and Price together. It emerges that Jeremy is bisexual, and has ...”