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“... Of the two​ folk-myths bound up with Englishness, the myth of St George and the myth of Robin Hood, the myth of St George is simpler. Robin Hood is a process; St George is an event. Robin Hood steals from the rich, which is difficult, to give to the poor, which is trickier still, and has to keep on doing it over and over; but St George kills the dragon, and that’s it ...”

“... more devout than the other novelist); no portrait stamp, no commemorative pillar-box at Waltham Cross. Perhaps the Surtees Society will do something for ‘the novelist who hunted the fox’. It would be a mistake to surmise from this that Trollope’s actual fiction has gone the oblivious way of Surtees’s, or Mrs Oliphant’s or Charles Lever’s. The ...”

“... moss, of air and of being the youngest of four sisters. In tone, the sequence is something like a cross between Auden’s ‘Academic Graffiti’ and the Private Eye scribbling of E.J. Thribb. Often, the line-breaks are deliberately clunking, as in ‘Aesthetics of the Outdoor Opera’: Sing as loud As you can At the outdoor opera – It will never Be loud ...”

“... has important implications: in his biography, Pushkin: The Man and His Age (1994), Robin Edmonds strong-mindedly refrains from even attempting to introduce Pushkin’s poetry to readers who have no Russian, and helpfully fobs us off with the diplomatic and historical background of Pushkin’s life. Feinstein also mentions David ...”

“... Joan’s own literary work, both as a Gothic novelist and as a poet, memorably epitomised as ‘a cross between Kahlil Gibran and Rod McKuen’. Extracts from Gothic novels in course of composition pepper the narrative, parodying the genre delightfully but also tracing the author’s growing inability to sublimate her sexual role through fantasies such as ...”

“... up the now familiar and haunting spectre of urban alienation’. Alison and Peter Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar is a ‘particularly depressing place to live in’, with an ‘almost manic system of walls and moats’, mainly an ‘example of the late modernist avant-garde determination to realise a theoretical position at all costs’. Even ...”

“... felt like twenty years. The reconstruction of reality in short-lived dramatic encounters, or as cross-pollinating conversations through which the protagonists literally talk themselves alive, seems always to have released Cervantes’s best inventions. Much of Don Quixote’s primary quality lies in doubly-generated immortal drivel interrupted by ...”

“... thousand men along three hundred and fifty miles of road’. My own first encounter with a working cross – an obviously well-used and discarded specimen – nonetheless came as a shock. One nail remained in the cross-bar and there were still traces of the meagre footrest on which the unfortunate victim would have perched ...”

“... Roman worker, heaven mainly means not having to graft, and there’s the bonus of free food – a cross between communion wafers and panettone, his ‘ppandescèlo’ probably a nod to the ‘pan de li angeli’ in Dante’s Paradiso. With Dante, though, it’s a different story. In the first canto of this third part of his Commedia, he links ...”

“... still. Even foreigners are treated to an intimation of these difficulties, especially once they cross the bridge and enter the thick press of people waiting to be dealt with by Israeli border security, the great majority Jordanian-based or West Bank Palestinians. Most of the festival people with security-friendly names or neutral birthplaces got through in ...”

“... secrets’ and to ‘hold discussions behind closed doors with its allies or enemies’. Many cross-channel differences that remain the stuff of platitudes are disappearing, but there’s a clue here to one that hasn’t gone away. French opinion is uncertain about white knights like Julian Assange, and still slow to pick up the language of rights, as ...”

“... that ‘he’s destroying everything now I’ve lived my life for.’ And what was that, exactly? Robin Wood’s book doesn’t live up to the very limited terms of its title, which must have been imposed upon it (since neither Reagan nor Vietnam appear even in the index) by a publisher worried about lack of market appeal. There could be no bolder contrast ...”

“... and Thirties. His son, the third Earl, who took over the work, died tragically young in 1985. Robin Birkenhead’s draft extended to the end of 1940. It had been shown to Sir John Colville, who was asked to finish the story. He declined, but wrote an epilogue giving his own view of the Churchill he had known. He died suddenly in October ...”

“... chromosomal locations are critical. When a pair is found on the same chromosome, the outcome of a cross is much less predictable than when it is on different chromosomes. Mendel, who died a year after chromosomes were first described, chose traits that happened to be on different chromosomes. The British geneticist R.A. Fisher once suggested that Mendel might ...”

“... and managed to be soupily soulful and vaguely prophetic in both languages. He also painted – Robin Waterfield’s biography is good on the recurring features of his art, including its ‘vague ectoplasmic figures, often female’ and the ‘veil of mist as a symbol for the dim access the normal human mind has to higher worlds’. Most of Gibran’s ...”