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“... us. One of them is John Felstiner, whose book about Neruda was reviewed in LRB a few weeks back by Christopher Reid.1 Felstiner some years ago wrote an essay that I for my part found arresting and persuasive, in which he argued – largely on the evidence of directions taken by several serious poets (Robert Lowell and Robert Bly, Elizabeth Bishop and Ed Dorn ...”

“... Old English as well as the language of Robert Browning (‘Oh, to be in England’), Linton Kwesi Johnson (‘Inglan is a Bitch’) and T.S. Eliot (‘History is now and England’). I had got as far as setting out the rationale for such a book in a lecture at the British Academy when the Penguin and Oxford anthologies of English verse edited respectively by ...”

“... statesmen, like others, did not know what they were doing.’ Something similar is argued by Christopher Clark in The Sleepwalkers, a book whose title says it all. I don’t think this is just an academic spat, a Historikerstreit, with little application to modern political debate. On the contrary, I think it has had a damaging knock-on effect on our ...”

“... unblushingly tried. He committed to a debtors’ prison (where he died) the by then demented poet Christopher Smart whom in past years he had befriended and helped. When the Duchess of Kingston, a close friend of his former patron the Duke of Newcastle, was indicted before the House of Lords for bigamy, Mansfield took the unprecedented step of granting her ...”

“... prose again’. And this is also why Bentley’s Milton was the graveyard of his method. As both Christopher Ricks and William Empson recognised, Bentley had a remarkable ability to spot the poetically dazzling in Milton. The trouble was he would then emend it away. When Milton’s devils smelt gold from ore, Milton says they ‘scumm’d the bullion ...”

“... happy consequences.) Judging from his hawkish counsel during the 13 days of the crisis, Lyndon Johnson was less impressed by Tuchman. But when Kennedy was assassinated he too had the First World War in mind, arguing that what happened in Dallas could plausibly be as badly misconstrued as the murder in Sarajevo had been fifty years earlier. A comparable ...”

“... for we have only to recall Derrida’s elaborate readings of Kafka, Geoffrey Hartman’s of Christopher Smart, or Barbara Johnson’s of Zora Neale Hurston, to see how much analysis of text and modification of the canon have gone into deconstructive theorising. But why should Steiner, who wants to replace commentary ...”

“... popular and influential in their time. They range from the work of witty polemicists like Harvey Johnson, who in 1903 examined the failings of white society, asking whether whites could ever be trusted to govern themselves, to that of entertaining frauds like J.E. Blayechettai, a lecturer on the black church circuit in the Twenties, who claimed to be an ...”

“... her argument, she distorts or simplifies individual plays. Miss Heinemann’s debt to the work of Christopher Hill is everywhere apparent in her book – and fully acknowledged. Readers who found Dr Hill’s recent book, Milton and the English Revolution, stimulating but not entirely convincing are likely to harbour similar reservations about aspects of ...”

“... Carlyle’s writings, with special attention paid to their political thought’, and Paul Johnson, whose high-pastiche polemic, Wake Up Britain! A Latter-Day Pamphlet (1994), was resolutely slept through. The Carlylean inflection can also be heard in the newspapers and magazines with which these writers are associated: the two Mails, the two ...”

“... us a sober, useful historical treatment of the development of the concept of structure; Barbara Johnson lucidly recounts the steps by which ‘writing’ came to mean what it now means, though ends with the revolutionary claim that ‘what is at stake in writing is the very structure of authority itself’; Paul Bové ...”

“... get high on his own supply. Cataclysms like Brexit, and politicians like Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson, are what happens when an entire country gets high on its own supply, but everyone else stopped buying long ago. I was in Brussels recently, taking my son to watch Anderlecht play, when I heard some English people in a café asking the waiter why no one ...”

“... above, and were often heavy: in Cymbeline, for example, Arviragus wears ‘clouted brogues’. Dr Johnson shows detailed curiosity about Highland costume; it had been banned after the Jacobite uprising of 1745, but it was, he noted, still occasionally seen in all its splendour. He first saw brogues on Skye: ‘a kind of artless shoes, stitched with thongs so ...”

“... format in each case. Taped interviews with eight or so concerned onlookers (some of them, like Christopher Ricks, George Steiner and Gore Vidal, younger candidates for sagedom) are cut and rearranged to give a chronological sense of each career, but also a whiff of the blood and cordite of intellectual warfare. The purpose is not quite literary biography ...”

“... Fortyish, leather-jacketed, sombre and Northern (‘Lots of planets have a North,’ he says), Christopher Eccleston played the Doctor as a man both hangdog and arrogant, of an age – had he been human – to have been a child when the show was first broadcast, but with a subsequent life that has shown him disappointment, including (a point somewhat ...”