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“... and works impressed him: Honegger’s Pacific 231, Ravel’s The Child and the Enchanted Objects, John Alden Carpenter’s Skyscrapers. He felt he could outmodernise them, but misfired with his opera The Fiery Angel, which concerns demonic possession in Renaissance Cologne. Between the first and second drafts, it became the noisiest opera ever written ...”

“... with an archaic intensity – as if body, fabric and landscape were all one. Here is farmer John Radcliffe, a mass of creases and mud, stitched and darned repairs. His cat has crept into shot. When Killip brought Radcliffe a print of this photograph, he folded it carefully till it could vanish into his coat pocket.In 1975, Killip was awarded a two-year ...”

“... English versions of the books of secrets could be picked up from dealers like the pharmacist John Hester, whose shop acted as an important centre of recipes and useful lore, while on stage Marlowe had Faustus, an avid reader of these books, abandon law and divinity for the science which gave him the secret of universal mastery. Works on ...”

“... into the stormy world of Victorian journalism, where public scientists such as T.H. Huxley and John Tyndall preached materialism, evolutionism and other views Maxwell (among many others) found loathsome. In 1868, the Saturday Review, edited by the erudite and chilly Oxford don Mark Pattison, biographer of the original Casaubon, summarised recent dangerous ...”

“... pantheon. But unlike such Oxford contemporaries as Trevor-Roper, Maurice Bowra or even John Sparrow, all of whom have been well served in recent biographies, Cobb was never a college head, and this may go some way to explaining his subsequent eclipse. It was a role for which he was epically unsuited, given his (very un-French) disdain for ...”

“... John Keats​ went walking in the Lake District in June 1818. It was the first decent summer since the eruption of an Indonesian volcano three years before had tipped postwar Europe into a crisis of failed harvests, mass hunger and widespread social unrest. In Britain, Lord Liverpool’s government had suspended Habeas Corpus; Luddite organisers, revolutionary Spenceans and radical journalists had been arrested and tried (with mixed results); the Peterloo Massacre and the repressive ‘Six Acts’ lay just ahead ...”

“... Bloodaxe version). Its most fervent admirer among those who plug it in its many blurbs is John Berger, who writes: I live in France. I take this book everywhere with me. And almost every day I find myself opening it to translate a poem to somebody after a discussion or a joke or a conversation. Maybe to a Polish building worker, maybe to two ...”

“... Lord Stanley of Alderley) are published here for the first time, with the permission of the Hon. Simon Howard. They cover the visit of the 57-year-old Robert Browning to Naworth Castle, the Cumberland home of the George Howards. Browning had recently published his great poem The Ring and the Book, with its dedication to his dead wife. He was mentally ...”

“... of parodies. This is not it. The superiority of Dwight Macdonald’s old enduring anthology to Simon Brett’s new ephemeral one begins in Macdonald’s not being a sloven. When Pope was imitating Chaucer, he did not write, ‘This sely Clerk full doth lout,’ but ‘full low doth lout’, a line which has rhythm and sense. Lewis Carroll, bent upon ...”

“... to the eye – or ear? or are they undercover? That’s not Jan Morris – it’s a writer called Simon Puxley. But it’s a style that this bellelettrist seems to be trying to respond to – not always successfully. This paragraph comes from her essay on Washington DC: Unreality, of course, whether comic, paranoiac or simply bizarre, is an attribute of ...”

“... be. ‘Literary work’ in copyright law is thus a semantic convenience of the same order as ‘John Doe’: what it is all depends. The legal fiction that the literary work has an abstract, single existence which accompanies but mysteriously transcends any book fits in nicely with the academic theory of ‘text’. It is no accident that the century which ...”

“... of the Welsh ‘father of English landscape’, Richard Wilson, curated by Martin Postle and Robin Simon. It is a magnificent show, the first on this scale for more than thirty years. It will be at Cardiff until 26 October, and it is accompanied by a sumptuous catalogue, the fullest, most faithfully reproduced collection of colour reproductions of Wilson’s ...”

“... as they are, can’t help not coming up to. The second or critical section is extremely strong: John Gross on the Oxford Book, George Hartley on the early publishing, Clive James on the jazz criticism as well as the poems, Alan Brownjohn on the novels, Christopher Ricks on Larkin’s poetic style and structure, Seamus Heaney on his idealism, and others. But ...”

“... hitherto regarded as talentless, overrated, or simply wankers: Oasis, the Stones, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Robbie Williams, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Salman Rushdie, Jeffrey Archer, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, William Shakespeare (although to be fair they despise the comedies and some of the history plays only). ‘It is ...”

“... for many years – a period throughout which he laboured alone to be a true prophet of the rocks. Simon Winchester has done a considerable service to geology in rescuing Smith from comparative obscurity. It seems extraordinary that Darwin has had several dozen biographies and T.H. Huxley not so many fewer, yet Smith has been celebrated only by his nephew ...”