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“... My acceptance of an offer to review the Kavanagh book landed me in a mess of puzzles. Peter Kavanagh, the poet’s brother, starts straight off, sentence one, by announcing: ‘When I write about Patrick Kavanagh I write as a partisan, as his alter ego, almost as his evangelist.’ And if you think that’s a dubious basis for a biography, what about this? As far as possible I shall avoid writing of him as a brother since my interest in him was mainly as a poet ...”

“...                               One woman Makes the rest look down. Wallace Stevens I’ve never much liked Tsvetaeva. A churlish way to begin: I do so simply because I think that, in not liking her very much, I am at one not only with much of her posterity but with almost all her contemporaries. On the way to hazarding some unpopular views, it is not bad to begin with one that is, if unacknowledged, widespread ...”

“... The new select committee system was launched in 1979 with a characteristic flourish by Norman St John Stevas, then Leader of the House of Commons. MPs were ‘embarking upon a series of changes that could constitute the most important Parliamentary reforms of the century’. The proposals were ‘intended to redress the balance of power’ – as between Parliament and the executive – ‘to enable the House of Commons to do more efficiently the job it has been elected to do ...”

“... his own words to music. ‘Klage an das Volk’ is the last of his poems to survive. Elizabeth Norman McKay, in her biography of Schubert, describes it as a summary of his thoughts about the decline in aesthetic standards in Vienna at the time (1824). My translation sticks as far as possible to the stanza shape, rhyme scheme and metre of Schubert’s ...”

“... ones, places where the culture was popular not high, then a pile of the Saturday Evening Post with Norman Rockwell’s covers was likely to have been a solace, and an entertainment. In my case it was New Zealand. My wife remembers sharpening her wits on the Post’s ‘Perfect Squelch’ column. I found a pile of Posts in the alcove of the hospital where the ...”

“... Lord Carrington and Norman Tebbit must be the Jacob and Esau of the Tory Party. Peter Carrington is beyond question a smooth man, and Tebbit is, if not hairy, certainly very prickly. They are also chalk and cheese politically, even though both have in their time been chairman of the Conservative Party ...”

“... both essays as a book. The Forward warned that Holt was ‘preparing to bring out a book by Norman Finkelstein, a notorious ideological opponent of the State of Israel’. Alleging that ‘Finkelstein’s glaring bias and audacious statements ... are irreversibly tainted by his anti-Zionist stance,’ the head of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham ...”

“... as Vermischte Bermerkungen (Miscellaneous Remarks), now appears with facing English translation by Peter Winch. (The title Culture and Value will make Wittgenstein turn in his grave.) For those who see Wittgenstein as the creator of a great new direction in philosophy it may come as a shock to learn that he did not regard himself as an original thinker. In ...”

“... in 1066, conveniently ominous for the tapestry’s mendacious propaganda on behalf of the Norman Conquest. 1986 sees another remarkable periodic manifestation: this year is the 900th anniversary of Domesday Book, and centennial celebrations are in progress. Domesday Book consists of two volumes compiled in 1086: a parchment folio, Great Domesday ...”

“... an ivy bush.The illuminations of the 12th-century Bury Bible or the mid-12th-century manuscript of Peter Lombard’s Magna glossatura on the Psalms are equally brilliantly coloured, but stranger, less sweet, more stylised and more exciting. In these, illuminated initials articulate the work as well as decorating it, identifying layers of text, commentary, and ...”

“... licence fee was up for consideration, the BBC had come under continuous attack, an attack led by Norman Tebbit over the Libyan bombing coverage among other matters. More recently, the BBC precipitately withdrew a programme on Peter Wright’s book Spycatcher. Self-censorship has replaced censorship from outside – where ...”

“... that was so tight it gave her a headache. Difficulties with clothes occur in many of her books. Peter Rabbit’s expression of resigned discomfort as his mother buttons his coat up too tightly under his chin, Tom Kitten’s wide-eyed dismay as the buttons fly off his Sunday suit, and numerous accidents to pinafores are among the details that give the tales ...”

“... to be exposed early to Greek or Latin, or even to their own language as it existed before the Norman Conquest, tend to find the notion of grammatical case baffling despite the survival in English of a genitive case (renamed possessive) and the distinction between subject and object pronouns in the first and third persons. Evidently, the alleged Irish ...”

“... Like the Tate, it became a gallery of modern, not just native modern, art. Unlike the Tate, as Peter-Klaus Schuster’s essay in the catalogue makes clear, the Nationalgalerie was carried forward, buffeted, and thrown back, by political forces. Its greatest directors were bold in their aims and acquisitions, and suffered for it. In 1896 Hugo von ...”

“... to reinvent: his The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. has been reviewed in these pages, nor are Norman Stone, James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes always less fanciful. And if Hitler’s personality remains an unanswered question, so too, does the history of National Socialism – which a book like Robert Harbison’s recent Deliberate Regression: The ...”