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“... or to future generations the overflowings of [my] mind ...’ The passage is quoted both by Paul Dawson and Claire Tomalin, and I can give no better indication of the different styles and standpoints of their two books than by reproducing their comments on it. Dr Dawson, whose work is a detailed, scholarly study of Shelley’s political ideas, writes ...”

“... this last from Lisa Henderson, quoted in Peter Brook and the Mahabharata, edited by David Williams (1991). The most sustained attack is by Rustom Bharucha (again, in Williams), which places detailed criticisms of Brook/Carrière’s treatment of key episodes from the narrative within an overall charge of cultural ...”

“... rather than present self-loathing. He might have added that for the supposedly anti-fleshly St Paul, it is the sexual coupling of bodies which symbolises the relationship between Christ and his people, and that in Christian tradition celibacy is meant to be a sacrifice. Since it is no sacrifice to surrender what you regard as worthless, Christian ascetism ...”

“... of the human spirit, which there is no reason to believe he ever entirely abandoned. For Raymond Williams, Establishment-bred leftists who finally revert to type can be seen as cases of what he calls in Culture and Society ‘negative identification’. The dissident offspring of the upper middle class throws in his lot with the militant proletariat, largely ...”

“... of the distinctions we make. Likewise the possibilities of moral scepticism discussed by Bernard Williams in ‘Moral Luck’, an essay she has earlier attacked, do not depend on a failure to realise that all ordinary language, including his own in the essay, is impregnated with notions of praise and blame: they anticipate a potential obsolescence in our ...”

“... they mean Robert Lowell, or Allen Ginsberg, or the Black Mountain imitators of William Carlos Williams. ‘The Liverpool Poets’ are regarded with a mixture of fear and derision. ‘The ranks of the illiterate raise puerile and rhythmless voices,’ wrote Roy Fuller. ‘Infantile simplicity is all,’ wrote Julian Symons.What no one in the symposium ...”

“... of the dedicatory poem called ‘Zueignung’, which opens Faust: Part One, are translated by John Williams as What I possess now vanishes before me, And what was lost alone has substance for me. Was ich besitze, seh’ich wie im Weiten, Und was verschwand, wird mir zu                 Wirklichkeiten. The English lines are graceful and ...”

“... in the US when it wasn’t. His response was to talk and to write, just as relentlessly. Tennessee Williams, who first met Vidal in Rome in 1948, the year the CIA orchestrated the outcome of the Italian elections, said: ‘I wonder if any other living writer is going to keep at it as ferociously, unremittingly as Vidal. He has a mania for bringing out one book ...”

“... envisioned by Emerson, who ‘re-attaches things to Nature and the whole’, to Peter Stillman, in Paul Auster’s City of Glass, crazedly attempting to re-create prelapsarian speech. Olson, it is often pointed out, is the first poet to have described himself as ‘Post-Modern’. That was in 1952. Five years before that he published his first book, Call Me ...”

“... Sixties it was (mainly) Georges Poulet. Thereafter – and more controversially – it would be Paul de Man. The Geneva critics taught Miller to conceive of literature not as words on the page, not even as literature, but as ‘consciousness’. At its simplest, phenomenology resurrected the author whom New Criticism had killed. The text could now be known ...”

“... in one respect, though: something is happening in recent British and Irish poetry. Poets like Paul Durcan, Ian McMillan and Peter Didsbury (all well represented here) are pushing the form towards performance and gaudy narrative. Many of the poets are writing long, stringy lines reminiscent of the American poet C.K. ...”

“... Thank you for keeping still,’ Elizabeth Taylor says to Paul Newman at the end of the movie version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958). Taylor’s character is thanking Newman for not saying anything when he hears her lying about being pregnant. But ‘Thank you for keeping still’ is also a good summary of Newman’s acting style, especially in his early films, when the main thing required of him was that he display his magnificent torso and his dazzling blue eyes for the audience to drink in their full manly beauty ...”

“... members preferred less gruesome explanations for the playwright’s brilliance. Robert Folkestone Williams, later to write a trilogy of biographical novels about Shakespeare – Shakespeare and His Friends, The Youth of Shakespeare and The Secret Passion – reverts to a less elaborate version of the Ovid-goes-to-Stratford manner in ‘A Hymn to ...”

“... and hardships into which he was leading them.’ In his contribution to Shafted, the journalist Paul Routledge – the author of a biography of Scargill – concludes dolefully that the ‘war is over. Nothing is gained by remaining in the trenches of 1984, powerful though those experiences and memories are.’ The best Granville ...”

“... Professor Shahak, the great Israeli human rights activist. There is a strikingly good article on Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet in which Hitchens discusses the ambiguities and contradictions of British rule in India. And there is an excellent defence of George Orwell which is somewhat reminiscent of Orwell’s own essay in defence of Kipling. Hitchens lines ...”