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“... thicket of names. ‘A wonderful, dainty, very loving little novelist’, he said of his friend Christopher Isherwood. As with many of those who are dependent for their status on the high status of others – none more than Spender, who thought ‘continually of those who were truly great’ – there appeared to be a measure of disdain in the well-stirred ...”

“... Alcmanics (or is it Alcaics?) – and one of the few to describe our current impoverishments. Christopher Reid’s interrogation of language expresses itself in an interest in translationese. Katerina Brac seems to have arisen from a long immersion in Oxford and Penguin books of verse in translation. Its language is a kind of anti-dialect – English, but ...”

“... Wood (1927) was his favourite – and his status as a Scottish monument, a descendant of Scott and Stevenson. There’s nothing fanciful about this – Janet Adam Smith reported that Clement Attlee pointed out to her a borrowing from Kidnapped in The Thirty-Nine Steps – and if he had had a slightly different temperament Buchan might have become a more ...”

“... to Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno stories, taking in works by Michelangelo, Col-eridge, Hogg, Stevenson, Kafka, Jean Rhys and numerous others. It is a short book, but dense. Warner’s highly complex line of argument, winding around so much material, and so tightly, produces a compacted, even crabbed architecture. You feel like you’ve stepped inside a ...”

“... she doesn’t sound like one. She sounds like a hammy male actor in late middle age – perhaps Christopher Lee in his prime, or Simon Callow. She is Gin Rathbone, and she introduces herself with these fine words: ‘I am a tall, thin, untidy Englishwoman, I drink too much and yes, I suppose I am rather – oh, detached – distant, aloof ...”

“... great practitioner of the art in the last century and in this short, sparkling and committed essay Christopher Hitchens writes in somewhat the same tradition. He is a radical British journalist living in the United States who is married to a Greek Cypriot and has an understanding of and love for this unfortunately-placed island. For him, enjoyment of the great ...”

“... America’), Oscar Wilde and Rupert Brooke (‘Aesthetic America’), Kipling and R.L. Stevenson (‘Epic (and Chivalric) America’), H.G. Wells (‘Futuristic America’), D.H. Lawrence (‘Primitive America’), W.H. Auden (‘Theological America’), Aldous Huxley (Psychedelic America’), and ...”

“... however tough his assessments may be. Balzac, Browning, Hawthorne, Emerson, Flaubert, Maupassant, Stevenson all come in for this treatment, are covered, to use a recurring image of James’s, by the critic’s generous wings, sheltered in the imagination’s irony. The irony may help us in a current critical dilemma, since it mediates delicately between ...”

“... modern analytic philosophers. For according to both Aristotle and such philosophers – Ayer and Stevenson are two distinguished examples – discerning the relevant facts is, as it were, a preliminary task which has to be completed before an evaluative judgment or choice is made. According to Weil and Murdoch, the central moral task often just is learning ...”

“... of the poets Motion and Morrison published in Contemporary British Poetry: Douglas Dunn, Anne Stevenson, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Andrew Motion, Derek Mahon, Fleur Adcock, Carol Rumens, Medbh McGuckian, Penelope Shuttle and others. Geoffrey Hill, Dannie Abse, Denise Levertov, Peter Red-grove, U.A. Fanthorpe, Gillian Clarke, Eiléan Ní ...”

“... the other to Panorama. Ours was in America, with Woodrow Wyatt, who was covering the Eisenhower-Stevenson election campaign. So, on the off-chance that our visas might come through, I booked four seats and cargo space for our cumbersome camera gear on a flight to Warsaw, via Vienna, for Monday 29 October. Meanwhile, Khrushchev had flown home, only to find ...”

“... William Morris wallpaper, Arts and Crafts furniture; a library of Victorian and Edwardian fiction, Stevenson, Meredith, Wells, Conrad, W. Pett Ridge. Moorcock, with his sacred cats in a basket, brings up a map of London on his screen, shifting and rearranging co-ordinates until the city conforms to his reading of it. No longer able to potter out into Notting ...”

“... obsessed with its own version of English continuity. As Cairns Craig has argued in Cencrastus, Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson see class struggle as fundamental to English history, but conceive that history to be ‘shaped as an autonomous inner trajectory defined by the conflicts and the accommodations between classes which do not need to be understood ...”

“... was done with a nurse’s blue pencil on the flyleaf of a volume of The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson.‘These drawings were presented to me by a very ill man,’ the catalogue entry read, quoting Edward Adamson, the art therapist who first encountered J.J. Beegan in 1946. By the time they met, Adamson explained, Beegan ‘had been in a locked ward in ...”

“... feigning’ of art. Again it depends who is doing it, and how good they are. Craig Raine and Christopher Reid are very good indeed, word processors as sensitive as Heaney. Far from being gimmicky, as its detractors imply, this poetry is always extremely clear and direct, and capable at its best of a wide variety of effect. One of the most impressive ...”