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“... Fisher still addresses the matter of his city: the ‘Handsworth Liberties’ cycle is one of the best works of his mid-career. But there is a new interest in how places are made in writing, in the chorography of a page. It is sad to find ‘Handsworth Liberties’ excluded from The Dow Low Drop, and regret becomes disgruntlement when the sheer extent of the ...”

“... of Lord David Cecil, et cetera, and became a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret – the next best thing, perhaps, to Betjeman bagging a royal. His relationship with Cavendish was clearly one of the most important in his life, but the reader is left to infer from Hillier’s silences, or to guess from the odd clue or glimpse, the precise details and ...”

“... Troilus and Criseyde, set with pagan aplomb in ancient Troy, he approvingly quotes the rhetorician Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s New Poetics. For all his fame as a master of the low style, Chaucer does not really breach decorum: the bawdiest Canterbury Tales are told by pilgrims of the lowest station, and incongruity is deployed with deliberately comic or satirical ...”

“... Xenopsylla cheopis,’ she says, ‘haunts this book like a tiny destroying angel.’ It is the best transmitter of the bacterium from rat to rat, or from rat to human, because when the flea has fed on a plague sufferer, the bacterium grows in its stomach, blocking it. The hungry flea then feeds again, regurgitating Yersinia in its saliva into the new host ...”

“... about a month ago and have just revised and sent off to Poetry Chicago today. I believe it is the best thing I’ve done.’ As we close in on the centenary of Basil Bunting’s birth at Scotswood-on-Tyne in 1900 it looks more and more as if this long poem written late in his life is not simply the best thing that Bunting ...”

“... seeking to burnish the Labour Party’s shabby image. Now, in 1987, Captain Maxwell does his best when not buying up industrial companies or running Oxford United. But it is not the same. The Mirror is cracked and the images confused. It is part of the history of the British press, but may not much belong to its future. To a grammar-school boy growing up ...”

“... Opening Day, and before long his work could be found in the small magazines of his time such as Geoffrey Grigson’s New Verse and his friend Roger Roughton’s Contemporary Poetry and Prose, Browsing in Zwemmer’s as a schoolboy, he had encountered Surrealism in its heyday and news of the Surrealist revolution in Europe in the mid-Thirties transformed his ...”

“... ought to know what to expect from a book called The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, by Geoffrey de Ste Croix, whose career as an ancient historian began after the war when he was a mature student at University College, London under the great A. H. M. Jones. Jones’s Athenian Democracy (1960) remains the ...”

“... gentleman of the old school. The eldest son inherited the mysterious gift of producing an instant best-seller; Molly, one of the daughters by a previous marriage, became a famous water-diviner. When the treacherous Robert produced Goodbye to all that, the long-suffering father, who had supported and encouraged the son for many years and received in return ...”

“... some contemporaries by decades. Before many people had heard of either Michael Heseltine or Geoffrey Howe, they were juniors to Cabinet mogul Walker, first at Environment and then at Trade and Industry. Walker still insists that Heath never deserved to lose, and believes Heath’s style of politics, a Toryism he represents as both paternalistic and ...”

“... reworking by soloists of original melodies, stripped to their chord-structure, offers one of the best instances of substantially the same process in action. It’s not insignificant (as we say) that Oscar Peterson should have produced a work entitled ‘Signify’ or that Count Basie should have recorded numbers called ‘Signifyin’ and ‘The Dirty ...”

“... Tomlinson, Ted Hughes, Robert Graves, Hugh MacDiarmid, J.M. Synge, David Jones, George Steiner, Geoffrey Hill, Elizabeth Daryush and the fraternity of poets anthologised by Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville in A Various Art. It also includes a number of Davie’s poems. If we were to read the adjective ‘British’ in the subtitle of the book as an ...”

“... to the spare requirements of a myth, and it can be said to have begun in what Neville Cardus, in best Cider with Rosie vein, once wrote of as the ‘plain, lusty humours of his first practices in a Gloucestershire orchard’, and ended in London NW8, in the memorial street-furniture of the Grace gates that open onto the élite end of the ground at ...”

“... is not only non-theoretical but anti-theoretical. Enright’s tone, I should judge, is at its best when genially sturdy, when, for instance, he deplores Flaubert’s craving to score off his characters, and – worse – the craving of his commentators to egg him on: When Bovary’s horse stumbles as he enters Les Bertaux, the farm owned by Emma’s ...”

“... than ideas, and that since literature is written by people, about people and for people, it is best treated as human stuff and in a human way. Once upon a time Bayley would not have felt the need to spell out such a commonplace, but as fashions in the university have changed he has been drawn increasingly onto the offensive. The present volume acknowledges ...”