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“... exercised over me little of the magic it has for so many others, including Kavenna and Peter Davidson. ‘The Idea of North’ was the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould’s phrase and the title of a radio documentary he made. ‘I have an enormous compulsion to look upon the polar seas,’ he wrote to a friend in 1965, ‘and I find that this is ...”

“... and to pluck. Consider this delicious morsel of anonymity, ‘On a Lady Sleeping’, plucked by Peter Davidson from BL MS Add. 25,707: Calmely as the mornings soft teares shedd Upon some rose or Violet bedd May your slumbers fall upon you All your thoughts sit easy on you Gently rocking heart and eyes With their tuneful Lullabyes There are no firm ...”

“... Most of the chapters are a very personal kind of literary criticism of books by writers such as Peter Davidson (The Idea of North), Nan Shepherd (The Living Mountain), Richard Jefferies (Nature near London), J.A. Baker (The Peregrine), Jacquetta Hawkes (A Land) and Roger Deakin (Waterlog). It’s interesting that all these were connoisseurs of nature ...”

“... to find; electric lights have chased away the ‘spectral grandeur of winter in London’, as Peter Davidson describes it in The Last of the Light, his book about dusk (Reaktion, £20). For a long time, the drawn-out twilights of the northern hemisphere were aestheticised; the year’s dwindling inspired nocturnes, night-pieces, winter ...”

“... the demotic: fuck, balls, cock, cunt – this is Larkin’s equivalent of dialect. Nowadays Peter Reading is offering something similar, inserting into a great variety of verse-forms a language that is coarse, prosey and, some say, as they at first said about Larkin, scarcely the language of poetry at all. Reading’s vernacular England isn’t to be ...”

“... pile-up of this magnitude, however much he/we might wish to hail the editorial labours of Peter Davison and his assistants. Davison has been working on this edition for almost twenty years and, as he has not been slow to tell us, has had to overcome a succession of irritating setbacks – mostly to do with the shoddiness and indecisiveness of ...”

“... I do wish Donald Davidson would write a book. I mean, a proper book with a beginning, a middle and an end, in contrast to the collections of papers of which the present volume is an instance. My wishing so is not invidious. These bite-sized essays, each a mere fifteen or twenty pages long, often impress one as serious philosophical achievements even when they are read piecemeal, as they were written ...”

“... No one reading James Davidson’s enormous and impassioned book, which barely acknowledges the existence, much less the vast numerical superiority, of Greek heterosexual society, would get the impression that Greek homoeroticism was anything less than the central principle determining the varied cultural patterns of all those obstinately independent and idiosyncratic city-states ...”

“... So Demosthenes vilified a political opponent, as publicly corrupt and privately depraved. James Davidson’s concern is with those ancient appetites: food, drink and sex in classical Athens. At one level, he provides a guided tour from bordello to Billingsgate; at another, an essay on the politics of consumption. Social historians of antiquity face ...”

“... overall, been a surplus of cultivable land in relation to the number of people living on it. Basil Davidson argues in his new book, The Black Man’s Burden, that the blight that has settled upon black Africa in the present day is rooted in the nation-state. In developing his argument he spares no criticism of the African leaders who have used the powers ...”

“... Writing about Basil Davidson’s work for the LRB blog a few days after his death last month, I’d a sense that there was more to say. The record is magnificent: his sterling work in occupied Yugoslavia for the Special Operations Executive during the war, his books about this period, and then, famously, the histories of precolonial Africa and the writings on the anti-colonial liberation movements ...”

“... of her ‘Elegies’ in an article in English Literary Renaissance. For Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson, who edited Early Modern Women Poets (1520-1700): An Anthology,* Norbrook’s attribution to Lucy Hutchinson of Order and Disorder makes her ‘one of the most important poets, man or woman, of the mid-century’. This is a large ...”

“... criticism as a slur upon good scholarship as they ramble through everything from the castration of Peter Abelard to 19th-century Wyoming’s gun laws, in their effort to persuade the persevering reader of the imminence of this apocalypse. In order to save ourselves, we must sell our over-mortgaged houses, rid ourselves of debt and head from the cities to ...”

“... prime minister’s lurch to the right threatens their minor renaissance under the telegenic Ruth Davidson. Better Together is dead in the water. Though victorious in 2014, that coalition proved disastrous for Scottish Labour. The last thing it needs is another referendum. Many party activists say they would still vote No, but they would not, as they did in ...”

“... citizen, described by Robert Fagles as ‘arguably the finest Classicist of our day’, by Peter Green as one his nation ‘ought to bronze’, and by Jasper Griffin as a man ‘one would like to have as a friend’. In his long career he has written on many subjects: scholarly articles on the heroes of Attic drama in its golden age, unsentimental ...”