“... to a metaphysical belief system that maps onto a culture’s history and ethics. But, to borrow Christopher Warnes’s contrast between ontology and irreverence in his Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel,* the approach of contemporary retellers of myths, including Ugrešić, makes clear that the readers they have in mind aren’t concerned with ...”

“... compilations of greatest hits loosely tied together with obiter dicta. In writing about Edgar Johnson’s Life of Walter Scott, for instance, in the New Yorker in 1971, he assembled a sequence of favoured exhibits. ‘Idiosyncrasies are always endearing, and Scott was not without them’; examples follow. Then, further down the same page: ‘The working ...”

“... contributed to the science of literary interpretation.’ That certainly seems closer to Christopher Ricks than to Geoffrey Hartman. But James doesn’t say Sainte-Beuve had a horror of science, only of hardened, inflexible science, and James’s complaint against Taine, by contrast, is that he enjoys his simplifications rather than settles for ...”

“... lines. The clearest example in the 1979-83 Parliament was the Employment Committee where, as Nevil Johnson points out in the same book, chairman John Golding ‘recognised from the start that it was going to be difficult to hold the committee together and do useful work if its members were constantly caught up in the party political controversy so easily ...”

“... to have got the better of him. Most writers received a formulaic response. Feynman told Lyndon Johnson that the presidential telegram made his day; he gave his former senior colleagues a version of an Oscar speech, saying how he couldn’t have done it without them; he thanked his school and university teachers for their excellent service; he solicited ...”

“... with barely a second glance: the courtier MP William Collier and the theatrical impresario Christopher Rich, for instance, whose battle for control of Drury Lane Hill briefly blundered into in 1711; or the women writers such as Eliza Haywood and Martha Fowke, alias ‘Clio’, who were part of the literary circle that formed around Hill in the early ...”

“... Christ Church London. Members of the advisory board include the Republican House Speaker, Mike Johnson; the failed Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who called the 6 January insurrection an ‘inside job’; the former Australian prime ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott; the Blue Labour founder, Maurice Glasman, who attended Trump’s ...”

“... themselves established. Rawson’s writers in this collection of his essays include Swift, Pope, Johnson, Fielding, Boswell, Cowper and Christopher Smart. There are major essays on the character of Swift’s satire, Gulliver’s Travels, ‘A Modest Proposal’, the poems, Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’, the ...”

“... Cuban government’s blessing, in makeshift boats that sank. The so-called freedom flights Lyndon Johnson and Fidel agreed on to relieve the drowning problem brought a massive influx of unskilled labour to South Florida and New Jersey, while draining the island of professional and technical resources. Rioting arrivals from the Mariel boatlift cost Bill ...”

“... and literary types who gave up on these struggles or even went over to the dark side, such as Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis. ‘The useful idiots of the empire’, ‘the empire loyalists’, ‘the belligerati’: Ali’s contempt has the fluency of someone who has taken part in factional battles for decades. Hitchens is a particular target, for ...”

“... acknowledgment in the titles of a sequential arrangement – From Donne to Marvell, From Dryden to Johnson – makes nonsense of the claim to rigour. Penguin say they are reissuing the series because it sold and continued to sell, and a quarter of a century ago this was understandable. Then the Guide might have promised to have it both ways – by getting ...”

“... politically engaged poem we should have more of. Although Ken Smith, Tony Harrison, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Fred D’Aguiar and David Constantine can be found in one or both anthologies, we get the sense, in Armitage and Crawford especially, that ‘democratic’ has dwindled into a synonym for talking colloquially about modern things. What we will not find in ...”

“... or just left alone. Whenever they happen, he just has to answer back. Thus we’ll get, re Dr Johnson: ‘that doesn’t mean I can forgive him for resselarse christ what’s the matter with this fcuker?’ This ‘fcuker’ is his typewriter, or ‘wordprinter’, as he calls it. Some of the book’s most endearing moments involve Amis in conflict with ...”

“... spluttered. Not that you needed to be a Romantic to entertain such patriotic feelings. Dr Johnson felt obliged to take on Voltaire in the preface to his edition of Shakespeare’s works, contrasting the ‘garden accurately formed and diligently planted’ with the rich Shakespearean ‘forest’, in which ‘oaks extend their branches, and pines ...”

“... led him in the eyes of many to betray his left-wing views altogether. Such, no doubt, is how Christopher Hitchens will be remembered. The resemblances to George Orwell, on whom Hitchens has written so admiringly,* are obvious enough, though so are some key differences. Orwell was a kind of literary proletarian who lived in dire straits for most of his ...”