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“... Saving God and Surviving Death: Mark Johnston has gone for the double, and I’m tempted to think he has succeeded, on his own terms, many of which seem about as good as terms get in this strange part of the park. I don’t, however, agree with his reasons or share his motive for attempting to explain how we can survive death, and I doubt the necessity of some of the matériel in his admittedly fabulous argumentative armamentarium ...”

“... Appearing unannounced in 1977, Charles Johnston’s verse rendering of Eugene Onegin established itself immediately as the best English translation of Pushkin’s great poem there had yet been. It was an impressive performance even to those who could not read the original. To those who could, it was simply astonishing, not least from the technical angle: Johnston had cast his Onegin in the Onegin stanza, a form almost impossibly difficult in English, and had got away with it ...”

“... was taking a shit,’ which risks pressing the demotic a bit too hard. This tendency might seem to mark out the novel as boldly modern when in fact it belongs to a long line of books by women about what and how women think. Virginia Woolf pursued with interest the fiction produced by Dorothy Richardson, a rival annotator or recorder of female ...”

“... describe the intricate working of literary texts, was largely contained in his lectures. Now Freya Johnston, one of his former students, has edited a collection of ten of them, selected from ‘hundreds’. As she explains in her introduction, this was possible because Griffiths, unlike many lecturers, never extemporised, but scripted every word of his ...”

“... see in pictures such as The Magic Apple Tree and In a Shoreham Garden – works, Rachel Campbell-Johnston says in her new biography, ‘of mad splendour’. ‘In a Shoreham Garden’ (c.1830). Palmer has generally been well served by his modern biographers. The landmark in the field is Geoffrey Grigson’s Samuel Palmer: The Visionary Years ...”

“... world, “Monstrous Women should bring forth Monsters.”’ Outlandish events were supposed to mark the beginning of the apocalypse and the hybrid beasts issued from Toft’s womb must herald the end of time. Whiston thus flipped the usual version of the story: the doctors had not been deceived and then found out; rather, they had exposed a truly monstrous ...”

“... Perhaps the same was true of the Westernising intellectuals.The Great Purges of the late 1930s mark a shift in both Clark’s book and David-Fox’s. Many of the Stalinist Westernisers (including Koltsov, Tretiakov and Arosev) were killed, along with Comintern functionaries, German literary exiles and many other resident foreigners. Litvinov ...”

“... is not an ornament for the horror but the exact measure of its unspeakability. Sir Charles Johnston, a distinguished retired diplomat, is probably best-known to readers as the translator of the recently Penguined Eugene Onegin, said to be the best English version of Pushkin’s poem. The title of his new book comes from a review by Clive James in the ...”

“... character. Joined-up writing is not the only way to acquire literacy skills and the mechanical mark inscribed by depressing a key is easier to execute than the sign traced with a pen or pencil. Our predecessors were never faced with the possibility, which haunts the thinking of people like Hamilton, that learning cursive script before your fingers rattle a ...”

“... were the direct descendants of Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Real monsters. You saw the Mark 5 and Mark 7 bombs and you knew they weren’t fire-crackers. The Mark 7 was about two and a half feet in diameter, about 15 feet long and weighed 1700 pounds. We didn’t have to ...”

“... some in Gordon Haight’s magisterial work as editor and biographer. Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston have now provided a very welcome and complete edition of all the diaries and journals, covering the years between Eliot’s union with Lewes in 1854, when she was 35, and her death in 1880. Only around a quarter of this text has not previously been ...”

“... Greenes’, as they were known (to distinguish them from the ‘Hall Greenes’), made enough of a mark on history to merit extended discussion in this book. Raymond, the eldest brother, became a leading doctor and mountaineer, taking part in the 1933 Everest expedition. Graham became a writer. Hugh Carleton became a journalist and eventually director-general ...”

“... At first no bodies are found, so the people are simply missing. Giono uses careful language to mark this mystery (‘must have gone’, ‘disappeared from the face of the earth’) as if it were impolitic to assume or speak of direct violence. Then the bodies are discovered hanging in a tree, and the killer, a certain Monsieur V., is tracked down. The ...”

“... the scholarly research on both in the post-war period has been in English, as the names of William Johnston, William McGrath, Carl Schorske, Allan Janik, Stephen Toulmin, Andrew Whiteside and John Boyer testify.* There are a number of plausible reasons for this. The first and most obvious is the great diaspora of Central European scholars brought about by the ...”

“... in his sense of the autonomy of ideas – suggesting the style of that last of the literati, Mark Pattison – but if we reify Scottish wissenschaft with the political history of the place we can go far towards accounting for the power of present intellectual developments. One element of this is straightforwardly political. The 1707 Union didn’t mean ...”