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“... in a language that was not their first. Native language matters more than native place. Robert Frost was a Californian who entrenched himself in New England. T.S. Eliot, for all his Russell Square papistry, came from St Louis. These poets grew to be associated with the territories they adopted and which adopted them. The idea that a place or ...”

“... revenge on Edmund Wilson; the witches of Eastwick (lacking only their Hardwick) have vented about Robert Lowell. To interview all the exes of Philip Rahv would be an undertaking from which the most committed Boswellian might recoil. (Though it’s fascinating to speculate what might have happened if Rahv and Mary McCarthy had made a go of it; a marriage ...”

“... individual human beings.’ McCulloch argues that ‘anxiety about childbirth and mothering may explain Willa’s arguments in the Hogarth essay,’ and mentions a letter from January 1925 in which she describes a recent miscarriage. In August 1924 Edwin had published an article called ‘Women – Free for What?’ in which, channelling Thomas ...”

“... well have been Director-General in the old style. The relationship with the Board of Governors may now be easier. This Board itself, with its chairman in a position somewhere between that of a constitutional monarch and that of the President of the present French Republic, is also a relic of other times, as indeed is the notion of public service ...”

“... a world of face-values if not of faces – yet one where by the rules of the game any face-value may have a sinister obverse, and unexpected reversals of meaning are the one thing readers know to expect. So far so good: but in this novel the Agatha Christie reference is itself only a blind. Peter is apparently suffering from loss of memory, so that to match ...”

“... Justine’s foolish, ill-at-ease paramour; and Brett, L’s young and beautiful companion who may, or may not, be his lover. This cast has gathered on an unidentified island where they are awaiting some non-specific global catastrophe from whose effects money and circumstance have rendered them exempt. The book must ...”

“... or a warped reflection of the real, or a reflection of a reflection of the real; and all of it may or may not refer, however obliquely, to the world outside the novel, a world in which its author is an acclaimed creator of warped realities. It recalls all the conventions of the genre only to subvert them.The first and ...”

“... in Western Europe between the wars. Léon Degrelle’s party won 11.5 per cent of the vote in the May 1936 parliamentary elections, and 29 per cent in the rural Francophone province of Luxembourg. His youth and pungent oratory assisted Degrelle in exploiting the growing disillusionment with a stagnant multi-party Parliament: the brooms his followers ...”

“... they are habitually called in Israeli Hebrew), the earlier strata of the language may have become in some ways antiquated but were never made obsolete. A literate speaker of modern Hebrew is probably no farther removed from the language of the Bible than a speaker of modern English is from the language of Shakespeare: the basic vocabulary is ...”

“... The power of Beethoven’s music is not enhanced one whit by our knowledge that he was deaf. We may be amazed – and yet, as Solomon suggests, this very affliction may have assisted his ‘escape’ into his own world. If this was one of the means by which such magnificent concentration was achieved, the concentration is ...”

“... Both Lord Home and Matthew are posed uneasily in front of iron railings guarding a statue of what may conceivably be the founder of the college: on the sleeve of Roy Hattersley’s book is a photograph of his proud parents swinging their offspring, in a solar topee, across the sands at Bridlington. There is no doubt in my mind which of the two authors was ...”

“... red lipstick, she looked very desirable. We had some kind of meal, and went to the theatre – it may have been Measure for Measure at the Old Vic, a play Leavis regarded as a parable of repentance and forgiveness. Later, we got the train back to Carshalton and walked to her house. We made love again in the living room, rather more deliberately this ...”

“... This is the first volume of a projected three-volume ‘definitive’ biography of Robert Graves by his nephew, Richard Perceval Graves. It takes over where the author’s father, Robert’s younger brother John Graves, left off. John, who died in 1980, had been described by Robert as a ‘typically good pupil of a typically good school’ (to which he returned as teacher); he had for long contemplated the composition of a book called My Brother Robert ...”

“... in gear’. A character dies by autoerotic asphyxiation, aka ‘the old chokey-strokey’. You may find it silly, but, applied to the work’s more gruesome content – that’s what we’re here for, after all – this childlike language can be remarkably effective. It’s a rare day that goes by when I don’t think of King’s greatest, most ...”

“... and reinforced. Those partial to the conspiracy theory of the sinking island of English letters may take comfort from the fact that the selection of poems in Essential Reading (1986) is edited by Alan Jenkins of the TLS. And that book contains a few examples of what are (in part at least) knowing winks: after describing a catalogue of sufferings in ...”