“... a year. Other Oxford notables who crossed the path of these aspirants included Iris Murdoch and Wallace Robson, a young don with a fearsome reputation for learning and judgment, a man whose attacks on the entire literary canon he was employed to teach were of a ferocity even Amis, by his own admission, could not aspire to. Most of the other dons were mere ...”

“... The light brigade’s failure is still a touchstone: in February, the defence secretary, Ben Wallace, made reference to the Crimean War while puffing the Ukraine conflict as a glorious stand against Russian expansionism; the Daily Mail retorted by using the charge to illustrate the foolishness of intervention in remote quarrels.Russia’s late ...”

“... conglomerates have had to let it go. The Oxford University Press feel no obligation to keep David Gascoyne’s Collected Poems in print. Faber and Faber get along very nicely on Tom Eliot’s singing and dancing pussy-cats. The Cambridge Festival (don’t tell them) is nowhere, it isn’t happening. What’s the story? Even the participants don’t ...”

“... and pin them down in a way that could not be done with real American poets – Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery. She even places Lowell inside a critical trope. ‘The New Critical doctrine that every poem is a little drama built around a central paradox is ... in the very fabric of their lives ... especially Lowell, whose life is the emblem ...”

“... Bildungsroman, the life and impressions of one young man: he even gets born with a caul on him, as David Copperfield did. Serge, however, attracts no sympathy or empathy or whatever from his creator: he’s a convergence, or rather an area of concentration, where ideas, images, words, preoccupations gather and regroup. The book is split into four main ...”

“... dreamed up much of the look, the attitude and the lyrics, though not the sound. A full year before David Bowie adopted the same hair style, Westwood had her hair bleached blonde and cut ‘coupe-sauvage’ style: tufty, asymmetrical and barmy-looking. She went to America and dressed the New York Dolls. Together, she and McLaren assembled the Sex Pistols, whom ...”

“... there could be no natural explanation for the human mind. The British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace argued that evolution could never make a human mind – even though he was a strong supporter of evolution. He came to his conclusion after attending a séance, during which the medium floated above the table. He took this as evidence of supernatural ...”

“... the longer, posher vowels of my mother, who was born and brought up in Surrey. Her father, Grandad Wallace, had been a miner in Barnsley. One day, the story goes, he got on his bicycle and cycled down south. He reached Ashtead, in Surrey, saw a pretty lane overhung with trees, and said he was never going back. My mother still ended up in Yorkshire – and in ...”

“... of an intelligence clearly capable of passing the 16th-century equivalent of the eleven plus; and David Starkey’s fluent and vivid account of her early life and apprenticeship. Starkey confesses to having half fallen in love with the young Elizabeth, but to be merely interested in the later Gloriana, ‘her face caked in carmine and white lead ... an ...”

“... Jr was a serious student of philosophy and theology, drawing on the writings of Gandhi and Henry David Thoreau to develop a powerful justification for disobedience to unjust laws. At a time when only 2 per cent of the Black population had graduated from college, King exemplified the ‘talented tenth’ to whom W.E.B. Du Bois looked for racial ...”

“... the right direction (in 1948, that meant towards the Progressive presidential candidate, Henry A. Wallace). In practice, though, the letters proved much more than a stab at propaganda. Letter-writers on both sides certainly expressed pride in their country, but they were also endlessly curious about their pen-pals’ lives, eager to keep the epistolary ...”

“... and with different timbres, this refrain has been part of the Joe McCarthy movement, the George Wallace campaign and every Republican surge from Nixon to Gingrich. (But let’s not be too partisan about it; the rhetoric evolved from the days when the Ku Klux Klan and the Southern Democratic Party were each other’s official and provisional wings.) As ...”

“... of the first beneficiaries, Macmillan paying the then record sum of £7000 for American rights to David Grieve in the (disappointed) hope of repeating the phenomenal success of her previous hit, Robert Elsmere. After the ending of the three-voller in 1894, and still more with the expansion of the market in the 1900s, the possibilities for large earnings from ...”

“... Morton in The Vital Science (1984) shows how Wells, following such precursors as Alfred Russel Wallace and Grant Allen, soon became the champion of a ‘social reformist eugenics’, looking to female emancipation, birth control and the Welfare State to improve the species, and rejecting the policies of the human stud-farm. In his general view of the race ...”

“... unwittingly valorise the sentiments of British Imperialism in the Korda brothers’ film of Edgar Wallace’s Sanders of the River. Then there was Othello, also written by a white author, though scholarly opinion differs as to its degree of condescension. Robeson took the title role in three major productions – London in 1930, New York in 1942 and Stratford ...”