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“... not itself’, is given as ‘Nothing/is itself’, which surely means something quite different. Peter Stern, who died in 1991, has some charmingly strict words about interpretation in his lecture on the First Elegy. ‘Perhaps,’ he says, ‘you will begin to think of the poem in distinctly philosophical terms. It is to be hoped that you won’t. Rilke ...”

“... and riddles. Her mother, Marie Hansen, had immigrated to the US in the 1880s, and her father, Peter Walker, whom she never knew, was born in the Danish West Indies (after 1917, the US-controlled Virgin Islands). The little that is known about him suggests that he was half-Danish. By any logical account, Nella Larsen was a Danish American. After the death ...”

“... big and to be seen to be doing so. When, in his RIBA Presidential riposte to the Prince, Maxwell Hutchinson tells us to go on taking the medicine, the sense that we are being offered the dose which failed to cure last time round is hard to avoid: There is a growing feeling among the young architects now emerging into the profession that our ideas have ...”

“... his sister Lucy clung fast to the Parliamentarian loyalties of the St Johns. Her husband, John Hutchinson, was one of the signatories of the death warrant of Charles I. Apsley was no poet; his sister, who is best known for her memoir of her husband, an important source for historians of the Civil War period, began writing poetry in her teens. Norbrook ...”

“... The troubles at the LSE go back a long way. Perhaps they began on the day in July 1894 when Henry Hutchinson shot himself, thus activating the terms of the will that he had made. A loyal if morose member of the Fabian Society from Derby, Hutchinson had stipulated that the bulk of his sizeable fortune – say a million in today’s money – should be applied by his executors ‘to the propaganda and other purposes of the said Society and its Socialism ...”

“... time avoiding grey caution, is not always easy. In spite of these and other problems Mr George Hutchinson has been remarkably successful in this short and admirably written biography. It is a portrait which is recognisable and vivid, essentially sympathetic but not uncritical. A valuable by-product is the author’s decision to reprint Iain Macleod’s ...”

“... as a foolish parasite on Johnson’s greatness, a ‘tomtit twittering on an eagle’s back’, as Peter Pindar had called him. Then, in 1925, the seesaw that had always been Boswell’s fate tilted once again. That year saw the beginning of one of three remarkable American initiatives, all linked in some way to Yale University, that would considerably enrich ...”

“... What comes across strongly in the book, written with the Moscow-based French journalist Sam Hutchinson, is the sheer, offensive stupidity of the Soviet authorities, and the pettiness of their motives. One of the easiest ways to add lustre to your place in history is by decorating it with innocent corpses: in a way Stalin and his minions are still ...”

“... he became an MP, so that reading his autobiography, Speaking Out: Lessons in Life and Politics (Hutchinson, £20), one has the strange impression of his career slowing down at exactly the point you’d expect it to get started, as he leaves behind the international summits and the dramas of Budget day, to become bogged down in the prosaic duties of ...”

“... sister-in-law thought that the house-guest was not ladylike enough. Mrs Hemans, Sara Hutchinson complained, offended feminine etiquette and had ideas above her station. She was ‘that despicable thing: a woman living on admiration’. She talked incessantly, expecting not only to be listened to but to be found ‘brilliant’; she was ‘spoilt ...”

“... modern Anglo-American publishing. Who but an agent could have negotiated the reported contract for Peter Benchley’s Island: $1.5 m. for movie rights, 5 per cent of royalties for the theme music, $75,000 if selected by the Book of the Month Club, $25,000 for every week the novel made the New York Times best-seller list, plus all the foreign and subsidiary ...”

“... which correspond to a little less than half of the published text: 44 per cent, according to Peter Davison’s estimate. These have now been published in an opulent edition: the right-hand pages of the book give a full-size photograph of the material, the left-hand pages contain Professor Davison’s transcription, laboriously deciphered, the cancellings ...”

“... Wordsworth for most would be impossible. To Shelley he seemed ‘a solemn and unsexual man’ (‘Peter Bell the Third’), and even the revelation early in this century that he had a French girlfriend, and French illegitimate daughter, has not altered the stuffy public image of Victorian Poet Laureate and sage of Rydal Mount. If anything can change this ...”

“... MacSweeney’s first book, The Boy from the Green Cabaret Tells of His Mother, was published by Hutchinson New Authors in 1968 with an acid pink/red/green/purple laminated cover and a winning photograph of the poet, which immediately fused with one’s idea of Eric Burdon, the other Tyneside beauty of the moment. The poems were good, too: this was the New ...”

“... including the controversial kidnapping of the German commander on Crete. The third was Barbara Hutchinson, whose mother, Mary, a cousin of Lytton Strachey, had been a Bloomsbury hostess and a model for Matisse. Barbara had married the Greek painter Nico Ghika. The women were acquaintances rather than friends, but over lunch they shared details of their ...”