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“... Some answers to these questions are suggested in these recent books by Olive Anderson and Donald Read. Both are excellent pioneering studies. Both are concerned with modes of right and wrong behaviour. Both attempt to pose questions about Victorian England at large. And both enhance our capacity to probe the values of this abundant and complex ...”

“... They have risen since then. It is a great story, featuring some rum characters. Donald Read is an emeritus professor of modern English history at the University of Kent. This is an authorised account, commissioned and copyrighted by Reuters, but ‘the text has been prepared with complete independence.’ The lists of acknowledgments ...”

“... The first poem by Donald Justice I ever read was the much anthologised sestina, ‘Here in Katmandu’: We have climbed the mountain, There’s nothing more to do ... It seemed to me then, and seems to me now, a beautiful and mysterious object, resonant and yet resistant to paraphrase ...”

“... family jokes,   I lay awake, repeating a sentence over and over   in my head: It was as if I read it in a book: ‘Then, when   he was only nine years old, “Death became a ...”

“... years, who answered his advertisements in the newspaper for anyone willing for a fee to talk or read to him or otherwise make themselves useful. One such was Eddie Simms, chauffeur, manservant, confidant and raconteur, who claimed to have been a professional ice-skater, and a baseball-player, and to have driven for Diamond Jim Brady and Lillian ...”

“... To read Donald Prater’s biography of Rilke in the hope of getting to know the poet in depth would be a tantalising exercise. Lack of information is not the problem. There is no shortage of documentary evidence available to the investigator and Prater has made full use of it. Rilke himself supplied his large share in letters of a princely egocentricity, upon which he appears to have lavished a formidable outlay of time and creative energy ...”

“... in the late Forties. I was so stimulated by it that I determined to get in touch with him. I had read somewhere, I think it must have been in Music Review, a long notice by Hans, most probably the performance of an opera (Mozart?) at Sadler’s Wells or Covent Garden. I was knocked out by it, by its precision, its confidence and all the very specific points ...”

“... Phyllis Koestenbaum, Barbara Moore, David MacSweeney (one out of two), Randall Garrison, Donald Stallybrass, Ellery Akers, Peter Abbs, John Hodgen, Andrew Motion, Edwin Drummond, Gregory Harrison, Gordon Mason and Robert Ballard, Isabel Nathaniel and Peter Didsbury, Anthony Edkins and Brian Cosgrove. Several get prizes, and in particular Andrew ...”

“... than national treasure, never to be surpassed. And yet everyone we listen to, down to those who read the lessons in our parish church, proceeds on the assumption that this allegedly unsurpassable text can be, and needs to be, surpassed. Everyone who undertakes to interpret the Scriptures, however modestly, begins by offering an alternative ...”

“... fact of being everywhere a foreigner was probably an assistance to his native wit.’ And Donald Davie, who everywhere has his native wits about him, has he profited much from living abroad? In half-praise of George Steiner, Davie floats ‘a tradition of high-flying speculation about literature, which we costive islanders cannot afford not to profit ...”

“... country through study and then begin to remember it as their own birthplace. Others, like David Donald and Jeffrey Hart, remember it first and then study it up in order to flesh out their memories with circumstantial detail. In either case, historiography is given the task that Wordsworth assigned to poetry: to reconcile the seemingly unrelated worlds of ...”

“... Sue Lenier’s poems occupy 70 closely printed pages, of which I have read – the things I do for LRB! – 50 or so. If ‘read’ is the word for what one does, or can do, with language like this: Mourn no more for the flowers you have broken, Lies you have told and clouds stirred on my face Roused from my dark to the moons you have awoken, In this fair night your blackness keeps no place, When Winter holds her blue tongue to the trees Licking them white, they cry not at their death With tears like wings of flies washed in the breeze And blown away, each sad and lonely breath, And as each creature waits for Spring’s pale arms To rouse their sleep and tenderly lead them out, So I to you who did me all this harm Will wait, heart-full, to wake you with my shout  Of happiness, love and trembling sin –  As all the night goes out, the stars come in ...”

“... child, born into a family living through the Depression, at first comfortably. He has a brother, Donald, who is eight years older and altogether more competent. Donald reads Popular Mechanics and Radio Craft. He shrewdly perceives the sinister implications of Fascism long before American political commentators. Grown ...”

“... prefer to Gittings’s biography a later one by Michael Millgate, which is said to be (I haven’t read it) more temperate and more boring, at all events more compassionate. A second rearguard action is mounted by Peter J. Casagrande (he’s American, and thanks the General Research Fund of the University of Kansas), who shows at inordinate length in the ...”

“... is what we want to inspire, this psalm is very inspiring indeed. Milton for one obviously read these verses with relish when, on 14 August 1653, he put them into metre: God is a just god and severe, And God is every day offended; If the unjust will not forbear, His sword he whets, his bow hath bended Already, and for him intended The tools of death ...”