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“... through it will your heart survive. Be forever dead in Eurydice ... Sonnets to Orpheus, II, 13, Stephen Mitchell’s translation Rilke was born into an ambitious but failing family in German-speaking Prague in 1875. His first given name was René, which he changed to Rainer when he met the extravagant Lou Andreas-Salomé. Before that he had unhappily ...”

“... was acknowledged while support for its claims was avoided. This wasn’t true in all quarters. A small number of economic historians in the US – many African or of African descent – maintained that, on the key issues, Williams was more right than wrong. Developments at the turn of this century led a larger group of historians, some just emerging from ...”

“... of his first commissions and then returning home to learn that a local shopkeeper has treated his small daughter, Peggy (Lucy Gallina), roughly. He grabs his daughter and drags her back to the shop, where he beats up the man, smashes the shop door and tramples on the man’s hand. The girl stands by, not exactly shocked but certainly horrified. Later she sees ...”

“... Muscularity and flex are not much in evidence. Instead, Halberstam’s Washington seems like a small town racked by palace intrigue, grandstanding, back-stabbing, information hoarding, careerism, cronyism, bureaucratic inertia, lack of focus and supine inattention. Sometimes decision-makers are excessively cautious, at other times they are madly ...”

“... work will be so reduced that the chances of doing so both accurately and accessibly become very small. Most genuinely interesting philosophical ideas are challenging to communicate, and Parfit’s commitment to a particularly pure version of contemporary analytic philosophical methods does less than one might hope to diminish that challenge. His approach ...”

“... the point that Trial by Battle is not really a war novel at all. Much the same could be said of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. Unlike Piper, Crane at the time had no first-hand experience of what he was writing about: he saw action as a war correspondent only after he had written the book. The point would be, though, that good works of fiction ...”

“... But all that has nothing whatever to do with this book.Although it appears in a series (edited by Stephen Heath and Colin MacCabe himself) in which the titles suggest all the latest Marxist, Feminist and Structuralist Paris fashions, the actual contents of this exercise, where they are comprehensible, seem to me to be distinctly old hat. Most of the essays ...”

“... the lives of Indians who never make it into the headlines or into the consciousness of the small ruling élite. Most of the characters in the book seem condemned to a life spent working to ensure that the élite can maintain their lifestyle. His first story is about his own domestic servant, Chandre, who belongs to a very low caste, and follows his ...”

“... scansion across the hammered metal of the afternoon sea, a sheet that my right hand steers – a small sail making for Martinique or Sicily. And yet to criticise Walcott for being derivative, or for his showmanship, is both small and mean-minded. (‘Fear of imitation obsesses minor poets,’ Walcott has written, and not ...”

“... and a poet. She tells the story of how she came to write the book, with the help of the biologist Stephen Jay Gould, in her Introduction. Gould, for his part, does some contentious stage-setting in his Foreword, where, with the apparent aim of encouraging respect for the ‘important’, ‘influential’ and even ‘beautiful’ theory of preformation, he ...”

“... instance, that one with the tall, ornate iron gates and a watchman dozing on a stool … or this small, shabby house with the girl Sandeep glimpsed through the window, sitting in a bare, ill-furnished room, memorising a text by candlelight, repeating suffixes and prefixes from a Bengali grammar over and over to herself – why did these houses seem to ...”

“... be funds for decontamination, a ‘precept on council tax’, unnoticed, except by readers of the small print. Representatives of 30 boroughs had their places on the council of the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority. Regeneration was the theme, the green lung. A ten-year strategic business plan: ‘It firmly embraces the principles of Best Value in pursuit of ...”

“... denunciations. The New Republic of 31 October ran a piece by Murray followed by 18 criticisms. Stephen Jay Gould spoke out in the New Yorker of 28 November. I especially recommend Alan Ryan’s analysis in the New York Review of Books of 17 November, followed in the 1 December issue by Charles Lane’s examination of some of the sources of statistical ...”

“... things – books, changed circumstances, surgery – are cures of one sort or another, for as Stephen Spender remarked in his introduction to Under the Volcano, ‘with Lowry one is never far away from the thought that although there is an illness there may also be a cure.’ They obtruded and impended like the gods in the life of a Greek, but when it ...”

“... in 1981 of a book focused on England: Patronage in the Renaissance, edited by Guy Lytle and Stephen Orgel. Taking their cue from Lytle and Orgel, F.W. Kent and Patricia Simons have turned the proceedings of a conference held in Melbourne in 1983 into a valuable volume of essays on patronage in Renaissance Italy. What is particularly interesting about ...”