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“... In​ the early 1960s, David Hockney made a series of etchings inspired by the poems of Constantine Cavafy; he went to Egypt to discover the places Cavafy had drunk coffee and picked up lovers, but in the images it’s mainly Hockney’s own life and friends who figure. The etchings touch on rapture, and the frankness of their erotic pleasure at the sight and memory of boys in bed brought Cavafy to a new, wide readership ...”

“... engage in a colloquy at a crucial moment of modern history – people like the educationalist David Hare, the Anglo-Portuguese poet and teacher Henry Derozio, the great Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt. If Kipling had been born fifty years earlier, it would have been impossible for him to write the cheerfully assonantal but bleak lines: ‘O East is ...”

“... to influential people. The King saw them; so did several senior clergymen. American opinion was vital, especially after the shocked and indignant reaction to the executions of the leaders of the 1916 Rising. (These had happened in May. Casement was hanged on 3 August.) American journalists, including the representative of Associated Press, were shown the ...”

“... height,’ he said, ‘and the weight of your chin, I’d recommend a hat with a broader brim.’ David Halperin’s new book, How to Be Gay, addresses the mysterious persistence of discredited elements from pre-Stonewall gay male culture. In theory camp should have been rendered obsolete by the arrival of models of gay behaviour not driven by the old toxic ...”

“... true poetry?’Returning to Hardy via these new selections of his work, edited by Ralph Pite and David Bromwich, I was surprised by how much I had forgotten – or misremembered. Whereas Bromwich takes his text from later editions, Pite opts for the first editions of individual volumes and provides a sampling of Hardy’s revisions in the endnotes, partly to ...”

“... Each paragraph is as firmly packed as a steamer trunk.Not all of this information serves any vital purpose (do we really need to know that Roth wrote to the co-op board on behalf of his agent, Andrew Wylie? Or that Roth’s friend Joel Conarroe read a goofy telegram at Roth’s sixtieth birthday bash purportedly from John Updike that began ‘Masel ...”

“... house. Within hours of her murder Tony Blair spoke of it as ‘a disgusting act of barbarity’. David Andrews, the Irish Foreign Minister, said that it was ‘clearly designed to sabotage the peace process at this very critical time’. A crowd of about two hundred young people marched on the RUC station at Lurgan. A few of them threw petrol bombs at ...”

“... For David Edmonds​ , and for many other philosophers, Derek Parfit, who died in 2017, was one of the greatest moral thinkers of the past century, perhaps even since John Stuart Mill. Edmonds rightly believes that if Parfit’s ideas about personal identity, rationality and equality were absorbed into our moral and political thinking, they would radically alter our beliefs about punishment, the distribution of social resources, our relationship to future generations, and more ...”

“... selection of speakers, who ranged from Patrick Heron to Victor Burgin, Mary Kelly to Robyn Denny, David Hockney to Rasheed Araeen. The highlights included Lisa Tickner’s brilliant dismemberment of Reg Butler’s defence of his question: ‘Can a woman become a vital creative artist without ceasing to be a woman except for ...”

“... de-forms, dissociates. This fact brings chaos into Hugh Kenner’s A Sinking Island: for it is vital to his fast and intensely clever effects – and Kenner is the most brilliant critic of Modernism, who never writes less than amusingly – to presuppose impatient positions, never questioned or argued out. He assumes an audience totally complicit, and an ...”

“... for example, or Maureen Forrester – and then follow this by listening to a countertenor, David Daniels, for example, or Andreas Scholl, or Iestyn Davies (or go on YouTube and listen to a recording of the last castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, who died in 1922, singing the Bach-Gounod ‘Ave Maria’, with what Feldman called a vibrato that is ‘often ...”

“... publication, he was nominated for election as an associate of the Linnean Society. According to David Attenborough, Lear is ‘the finest bird artist there ever was’. His drawings were primarily intended to help scientists identify species, yet his birds are exhibitionists as well as exhibits, always more than an instance that confirms a rule. The same ...”

“... out in its usual luxurious fashion, like unravelling wool. Until you are cool, settled and your vital signs good, time snaps and sings like an elastic band. When I write my diaries I talk to myself with an inward voice. For the next week I am conscious that my brain is working oddly. Imagine you were creating all your experience by writing it into ...”

“... by his book. William Gass was right to agree that many of the values defended by Rybczynski are ‘vital and worthy’, and to accept – albeit ‘at a certain split-level of ontology’ – that there is ‘nothing better than the life of the bourgeois’. He was also right to persist with critical questions beyond this point. Rybczynski may describe ...”

“... younger adults made for a profound reinforcement of ‘family’ values. In uniform or in ‘vital’ work, people had yearned for family life as it had been before the war – only better. They wanted full employment, they wanted improved educational opportunities, they wanted cradle-to-grave social security and good modern housing. Labour, elected to ...”