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“... not with the Laurentian astonishingness, the clairvoyant, deep-striking and wide-ranging genius, [James] is, as critic, finely and strongly central.’ Some might find this bullying or hectoring; I, too, find it so in the abstract; yet it does keep alive a certain vocabulary, it makes us think again before discarding those words and trying for a less overt ...”

“... may become a mere ‘to’, no ‘thee’ a ‘you’, no Jacobean trumpet a mere Hebraic ram’s-horn. ‘As it was in the beginning’ (when Sisson was confirmed) ‘is now and ever shall be.’ My youngest son has a poem of Sisson’s in the form of a wall-poster, expressing a complaint about public worship. It is called ‘The Methodists’ and is ...”

“... and in another language; many émigrés or refugees or transplanted folk (‘homeloose’ in James Wood’s coinage) end up with a rusty, old-fashioned command of their language of origin and an imperfect mastery of the newly acquired tongue. There are a few exceptions, but it is more usual to have one language for the library and another for the bedroom ...”

“... practices of writing in a political light. Her book develops the subject and historical method of James Boulton’s very good study of 1964, The Language of Politics; her cunning play with his title means that she sees the politics as much more pervasive. Even before the French Revolution, books proliferated on grammar, vocabulary, and the history of language ...”

“... the existence of those attitudes. It is clear that Wong would not be prepared to accept either horn of the dilemma with which I have presented him, and that he does think he has found a middle ground between objectivism and subjectivism. But I do not believe that he has. Fishkin shares with Wong the project of staking out this middle ground but he ...”

“... home is one of the places they are least interested in – but this needn’t be a tragedy. Henry James saw Stevenson as ‘the writer who has most cherished the idea of a certain free exposure’, adding that, ‘to his view the normal child is the child who absents himself from the family circle.’ Stevenson’s most valued version of the normal is the ...”

“... go to Jerusalem,’ Father Raed Abusahlia, a Palestinian Catholic priest, announced through a bull-horn. ‘So, we’re going back and will return here again on the 31st.’ On that day journalists and television crews came to Bethlehem to watch the marchers try again. There were no reinforcements waiting for them at the checkpoint. The reinforcements were ...”

“... Suite: it is scored for a comparable seven instruments (piano, string trio, clarinet, horn, bassoon) and Stravinsky actually prints in the score the tone-rows he is assigning to each player in the (electrifying) gigue finale, obviously modelled on Schoenberg’s. But, as Walsh says, there is no audible stylistic overlap: ‘The glowering ...”

“... more crates filled with letters. Selekt’s crates are yellow and stamped with the black hunting horn logo of Deutsche Post, the former German state mail monopoly that, like its Dutch counterpart, was privatised long ago. For years the two have been locked in a struggle for business on the streets of the Netherlands, part of a fratricidal postal war across ...”

“... it seriously, least of all myself. He dreaded having to explain himself ‘to a grey-haired man in horn-rimmed glasses peering over a giant folder labelled PERMANENT RECORD’. He was repelled by the ‘overheated, hormonal opinions’ of his younger self. He considered coding a script that would programatically wipe everything he’d written from every site ...”

“... Homer and Virgil and Chaucer accompanied Stendhal and Jane Austen, Dickens and Tolstoy and Henry James; and near the end was one poem that certainly might, in its intensity, be described as ‘short’ – Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This almost token poem, a magnificent simple affair that most of us did at school, is the world’s most ...”

“... celebrated Hemingway, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Richard Wright, Erskine Caldwell, Dashiel Hammett and James M. Cain, Beauvoir was told, when the United States had its own sophisticated tradition of internal, psychological exploration; she was witnessing the formation of the American Studies canon – Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Henry ...”

“... standard Twickenham Edition of Pope’s poetry, the volume given over to The Dunciad, edited by James Sutherland, attempts to present both the 1729 and 1743 versions of the work. It is wonderfully scholarly and informative, and unreadable except by the most sedulous academic. Sutherland’s notes bewilderingly intertwine with Pope’s, and the annotations ...”

“... on the sweet meat of the lemon trees.’ Camellias, trod underfoot in church, are ‘petals of horn, scales of blood’. A spider, ‘juiced crystal’, sways on a web, merging as by ascension with the ‘Milky Way’. Such elemental involutes recall Faulkner, except that Wright’s years in Italy seem to have lent him the fine-boned clarity of Montale ...”

“... they knew that it was modern.’ The modernists certainly took to her; she was published alongside James Joyce, positively reviewed by H.D. and praised as being ‘above praise’ by Marianne Moore. ‘If we choose to leave the poems of Charlotte Mew out of our literary heritage,’ Moore wrote, ‘we are leaving out an original.’The speakers of Mew’s ...”