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“... ten years or so ago), Mandelbaum’s and Pinsky’s belong firmly in the second class, whilst Ellis’s, which makes a point of the modernity of its idiom, aspires perhaps a little to the first class. The 20th century has been awash with Dante translations: Laurence Binyon’s in the Thirties, Dorothy Sayers’s in 1949, ...”

“... but subordinate or in thrall to them: ‘she was a close friend of Karl Pearson [and] Havelock Ellis, with whom she discussed, in person and in a vast correspondence, ideas on women’s sexual and spiritual needs and their position in a socialist state.’ It sounds very cerebral. Phyllis Grosskurth suggests something more carnal in her life of Havelock ...”

“... handled the countdown with more aggression and a lot more self-importance. The selector, John Hart, on their arrival in the changing room: ‘It’s going to be a long wait, boys. Time to concentrate.’ Then the coach Brian Lochore, voice breaking with emotion: ‘You’re a good team but you’re not yet a great team. If you win today you can say ...”

“... of public opinion. The Presidential election of 1800, in which Jefferson trounced the incumbent John Adams, witnessed an outpouring of newspaper and pamphlet comment directed against his religious indifferentism. Could he be so sure that an atheist would neither pick his pocket nor break his leg? Soon after his death, a fellow Virginian, ‘Black Horse ...”

“... make women? At 19 she was close to suicide, but found strength to go on from reading Emerson and John Stuart Mill. These are her own landmarks, ‘disconnected but indelibly printed in the mind’. At 20, she began to write The Story of an African Farm. If she had been the child of an English Evangelical parsonage, she would have been conforming, in her ...”

“... for supporters of Wilde and Beardsley, including Beerbohm, Carpenter, Conrad, Dowson, Havelock Ellis, Hueffer, Shaw and Yeats. The Savoy fizzled to an end (commercially at least) when W.H. Smith’s refused to distribute it after issue Number 3, on account of an illustration to an article by Yeats. Yeats later recalled how ‘the bookseller’s manager, no ...”

“... the same thing does not happen again. One of Ratushinskaya’s poems describes a dream in which John the Baptist appears in the Gulag, filthy and ragged, and is succoured by one of the female inmates before he gets ready to fly away. She longs for a miracle, to see her daughter, and begs him to perform it. But he is silent, weeping, and she wakes up from a ...”

“... allow for his personal reading temperament, his instinctive critical preferences and dislikes. John Banville roused my own antipathies as early as the second page of his novel: Kepler, arriving at a Bohemian castle, is greeted by a hump-backed dwarf who pipes, ‘God save you, gentles,’ and to make matters worse has second sight. When Tycho ...”

“... republican utopias, you could catch James Harrington at Miles’s; if you wanted literary wit, John Dryden and his mates would be at Will’s; and in the 1710s you could join in polite conversation with Addison and Steele at Button’s. If you wanted to gamble, the Young Man’s was a good bet; if experimental natural philosophy was your thing, Royal ...”

“... was impervious to the language of quiet diplomacy, however firm. Mandela studiously avoided him; John Major agreed only to a preassigned question at a press conference, in response to which he would ask for clemency; and Jim Bolger, the New Zealand host, gave him an audience on condition that he didn’t tell the media, then asked him how his father’s ...”

“... father and mother. He believes that he is the illegitimate son of Queen Victoria by her servant John Brown, who must have ‘lifted his kilt’ on some unrecorded occasion. Everywhere, on tea-caddies and biscuit-tins, he looks proudly at images of his mother’s face. Samuel believes it, but we don’t, any more than we believe Pip’s great expectations ...”

“... such an event.A less well-known but more interesting scam than any of these was pulled off by Dr John Ackah Blay-Miezah, who persuaded investors across Ghana and the US that he was the sole beneficiary of a $27 billion trust fund hidden away in Swiss bank accounts by Kwame Nkrumah. He explained that as the former Ghanaian president’s closest confidant, he ...”

“... feral figures became our familiar louche aristocrats and sapphic seductresses, most notably in John William Polidori’s The Vampyre (the other story written during that famous summer on Lake Geneva in 1816), Keats’s ‘Lamia’, Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ and Le Fanu’s Carmilla. Groom calls Dracula a ‘brilliant culmination’ and ...”

“... knows ...’: Macaulay out of Auden). The central plot device is borrowed (from Clough Williams-Ellis’s terrible vision in On Trust for the Nation). The central character is a composite caricature (part Robert Maxwell, part Mohamed al-Fayed). The story is as old as the hills (love, betrayal, the search for happiness). The plot structure is both obvious ...”

“... He fulfils a general desire to believe that the human psyche is not fully explicable. Bret Easton Ellis’s new novel, American Psycho, is an attempt to tell the story of a serial murder through a first-person narrative conducted by the murderer himself. The novel has had very bad reviews and quite a lot of publicity, the latter largely because Simon and ...”