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“... Answer truthfully from your own heart: 1. Rewrite The Waste Land using only English words of one syllable. 2. Rearrange the entire Bible into two columns, one headed KNOWLEDGE, the other WISDOM. 3. How many women did Henry VIII fancy, apart from his wives? 4. Make one of the following dramatic entrances: Natural, Caesarian, Episiotomy. 5. While breathing regularly, count up your limbs and cry ...”

“... sprinkle rich goodness everywhere. So slowly she backed into the mud. This is some distance from Robert Graves’s White Goddess: Redgrove’s poem celebrates a ‘black Venus’ who may owe something to Baudelaire’s mistress Jeanne Duval, but who has stepped straight out of the Game and who will walk into the purging, laundering sea, creating a ...”

“... foundational example) and ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’ (culminating in the bardic example of Robert Burns), surely underpinned Pound’s deep and lasting sense of his vocation as a preacher, teacher and poet. Despite his modernism, Pound was a product of 19th-century assumptions and cadences; Moody’s acceptance of him as a Carlylean ‘hero of his ...”

“... eventually, a Nazi obsession. In the Fifties, it returns as something brighter. The voice of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies grew out of a negotiation between European and American traditions, not least English and American traditions, with the balance of power tilting decisively towards America. Lowell, coming from an East Coast Wasp society, is ...”

“... The past, we’ve been told, is a different country and they do things differently there, but not for me, not where Alan Taylor is concerned. He had a most wonderfully consistent personality. That look of amused, quizzical discernment which is even in the photographs his third wife Eva took of him in the sunshine on the last day of his life was much the same as that which confronted me when I read out my first half-baked essays to him at Holywell Ford after he had first come to Magdalen in 1938 ...”

“... What is an urban legend? First of all, it is not the 20th-century, metropolitan version of Greek and Roman myth. The villains and heroes of the so-called urban legends are not the inner-city heirs of Persephone or Theseus. Rather, the urban legend (more accurately, the apocryphal story) is one of those amazing tales which has been the recent experience of a friend of a friend ...”

“... The story runs that the reason Tito lived so long in his last illness was that no one in the Presidential Council dared be the first to suggest that the various life-supporting machines should be switched off. Maybe in the end someone dared. Or maybe Tito, whose body in life had done so much to reconcile the politically irreconcilable in Yugoslavia, performed its final patriotic service in death ...”

“... In the preface to his new edition of montaged interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester draws our attention to what has become the last section of the fifth interview. Altogether, there are seven interviews but Sylvester considers the end of the fifth to be the most illuminating passage in the book: ‘I always think of myself not so much as a painter but as a medium for accident and chance … I think perhaps I am unique in that way; and perhaps it’s a vanity to say such a thing ...”

“... detailed and sometimes not-so-detailed arguments have been sharply questioned by the historian Robert Anderson. Davie’s emphasis on the importance of Scottish philosophical writings (among which he includes MacDiarmid’s verse) is designed to be controversial. It should be set beside the recent work of Alexander Broadie, to whose explorations of The ...”

“... Two interesting questions are raised by Alasdair Milne’s book about his time at the BBC.* The first, more important but less interesting, is: what, if anything, is wrong with the BBC? The second is: what, if anything, is wrong with Alasdair Milne? Milne’s answer to the second question seems to be ‘nothing much’ – which at least helps us with our own answer to the question ...”

“... When I hear​ other people talking about procrastination, I find myself getting proprietorial: surely their fleeting pauses are as nothing to mine. Procrastination is the main way I express anxiety and depression, if I can use these medicalised, dignifying terms. It’s franker to say that I put things off because much of the time I’m frightened and sad (too frightened and sad for procrastination to be enough of an outlet: I also have an array of psychosomatic symptoms: rashes, headaches and stomach disorders – not that the line between procrastination and illness is necessarily sharp, if it’s there at all ...”

“... When Adrian Stokes introduced Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytic researches into his appreciation of painting the results were sometimes so astonishing that I bought one of her books on child analysis. It was very, very clever, but I never got through it and stayed with Adrian’s extravagantly courageous application of her ideas. He made much use of her terminology in his last half-dozen books, and was particularly impressed by her belief that it is in the first year that the infant has to resolve its ambivalence towards the mother’s breast by discovering that the good breast, the one that feeds and envelops, is the same breast as the bad breast, which does neither ...”

“... Roy Hattersley’s book is an engaging account of what life was like for those caught in the poverty trap in Britain during the Thirties and Forties. The Hattersley family eventually climbed out: Enid, his mother, became Lady Mayoress of Sheffield and Roy a possible future prime minister. Like Mr Tebbitt’s celebrated parent, his father got on his bike, and at one time pedalled thirty miles each way to Barnsley on a machine with a front wheel so buckled it threw its rider into the air like a circus performer ...”

“... It is hard these days to open the newspapers without seeing a reference to the notion that Nato should improve its conventional defences. One day General Rogers, the Supreme Commander of Nato, is saying it, the next day it is Mary Kaldor, an advocate of unilateral nuclear disarmament, par excellence a ‘peacenik’. Strange bedfellows. Why this convergence on conventional defence? And where is it likely to lead us? The first question is not too hard to answer ...”

“... In October​ 1958, I became a student of F.R. Leavis at Downing College, Cambridge. I had taken the entrance exams the previous December, including the ‘dating paper’, which involved matching passages of English poetry and prose as closely as possible with their dates of composition. This was Leavis’s special creation, for which I had been coached pretty intensively by teachers at my grammar school in Purley ...”