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“... with readers alongside and among those I got to know in this way was the historian Cecil Woodham-Smith. The author of The Great Hunger, an account of the Irish Famine, and The Reason Why, about the events leading up to the Charge of the Light Brigade, Cecil was a frail woman with a tiny bird-like skull, looking more like Elizabeth I (in later life) than ...”

“... was expanding into a biography when I last heard, while Alan Bell, whose work on Sydney Smith is drawing to a close, plans to move up the street in Combe Florey and produce ‘a biographical study’. Though a West Country recluse can hardly be the centre of a literary movement, the comparison with Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury is not absurd. It ...”

“... and disarmament, cheap newspapers and the penny post. He is a worthy subject for canonisation. Anthony Howe’s comprehensive, erudite and superbly annotated edition of his correspondence will take its place alongside Gladstone’s diaries, the letters of Carlyle and Disraeli, and John Stuart Mill’s collected works as an indispensable resource for ...”

“... sumptuous, a boxed set with metallic blue tooled cloth bindings, designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith, which reinterpret Oriental motifs. But it hovers uneasily between a scholarly attempt at a definitive edition and a popular (and canny) piece of publishing intended for a wide market. Every translator, Borges said, must work with the orchestration of his ...”

“... and it would not be surprising if the first resignation were to come from Liam Fox or Iain Duncan Smith rather than Vince Cable. No doubt each of them has genuine objections to aspects of coalition policy. But if any of the three were to walk away, it would be as much from thwarted ambition – one of them was party leader, while the other two might have been ...”

“... Prime Minister. For anyone unfortunate enough to have read all the biographies of Wilson (Leslie Smith, Dudley Smith, Gerard Noel, Ernest Kay and others even worse) there is really nothing new here. It is the same old story of the young Boy Scout, Nonconformist and Liberal. He says he joined the Oxford University Labour ...”

“... or Baudelaire or D.H. Lawrence or Ernest Hemingway as conventional, but what about Thomas Hardy or Anthony Trollope or Jane Austen or Charles Dickens or John Galsworthy? And, in particular, what about John Mortimer? He would, I think, indignantly deny the suggestion, but although he espouses unconventional causes he represents the essential upper-middle-class ...”

“... Huxley, who indeed was then still alive ... It was the exact opposite of Brain of Britain. And Anthony Burgess was brilliant at it. Easy, smiling, courteous, uncompetitive, he was absolutely deadly when it came to the details of name and place. Dryden? Yes, we all got that, more or less: a well-known piece, but where from exactly? Burgess had the ...”

“... him’. Creating an imaginary fresco of King Candaules awaiting his wife on the nuptial couch, Anthony Powell observes that the expectant monarch has in him ‘something of all men’, his spouse absorbed in her own rituals ‘something of all women’. In the legend, Candaules dies for thinking his wife’s nakedness belongs exclusively to him, to show ...”

“... take long to forget it. In Scotland, our best Gaelic poets, with one exception – jain Crichton Smith – wouldn’t and maybe can’t write poems in English. It’s with our third language, Scots, that the problem is difficult, because of its relation with English. A Scot, born in Kavanagh’s circumstances and with his education, would have been torn ...”

“... a fine country house in Dumfries, called Craigielands, the family home of two of their number, the Smith brothers. Adam Forman married their sister, Flora Smith, and Denis was born and bred at Craigielands. Son of Adam describes the boy’s happy-seeming life on this estate and records his discontents. Young Denis enjoyed ...”

“... stuff that will fascinate and edify the working cognitive scientist. Mithen seduced me from the Anthony Powell that I was reading; I can’t imagine warmer commendation. Yes, but is Mithen’s theory true? For that matter, how well does it fit the ontogenetic theory that he uses as a model? And, for another matter, is the ontogenetic theory that he uses as ...”

“... In the same year that the Kitchen Sink artists were honoured in Venice, one of them – Jack Smith – won first prize at the John Moores exhibition in Liverpool, with his Creation and Crucifixion. Thanks to these successes, 1956 could be said to have marked the apotheosis of realism; it was also the year that the death-blow was delivered to the movement ...”

“... If anything, the expression ‘Age of Reason’ was even less satisfactory. As Anthony Pagden convincingly demonstrates in The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters, the fixation with the rationality of the Enlightenment misrepresents trends in 18th-century moral philosophy. This was an era when reason was dethroned as the monarch of human ...”

“... real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.’ This remark applies more perhaps to Anthony Hecht, who was born in 1923 and had published no poems before he went to war, than it does to anyone else. Hecht studied at Bard College then served in the US Army from 1943 to 1946. He saw action in Germany and Czechoslovakia in 1945 and was later ...”