“... human ethology. These authors include Konrad Lorenz, Robert Ardrey, Desmond Morris and E.O. Wilson. The present work is dedicated to the memory of Robert Ardrey, so the reader should know what to expect. The radical difference between social anthropology and the kind of thing offered by Fox needs to be spelled out since Fox quotes extensively from the ...”

“... The friend in the title of Edmund White’s new novel is a writer called Will Wright, a straight man with bad skin but a sterling pedigree. What little we learn about Will’s first novel – a metafictional romance about a man, the heiress he loves and an anthropomorphic cat – comes from Jack Holmes, a handsome, closeted editorial assistant who works with him at a literary quarterly in Manhattan ...”

“... writing capacious essays for the mythical common reader. We should be awash in V.S. Pritchetts and Edmund Wilsons. There are many reasons why this is not so. The audience for such essays is probably smaller than it was, and certainly less cohesive. The growth of the canon, and changing attitudes about elite culture, make the top-down instruction provided with ...”

“... weapons as a critic. Agee was not interested in teaching his audience, as Shaw and Mencken and Edmund Wilson were interested, and as his colleagues at the Nation Clement Greenberg and B.H. Haggin were. He does not drive home an argument and avoids underlining the implications of a perception. Rather, he will broadly sketch a chosen ...”

“... champions), but no chorus rises to proclaim Podhoretz the bold young successor to Alfred Kazin, Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, Stanley Edgar Hyman and Mary McCarthy in the Quality Lit Crit Biz. He is needled as a symptomatic New York intellectual specimen by Benjamin DeMott in the New York Review and cuffed around roughly by Hudson Review’s Marvin ...”

“... the Scoutmaster General. This was, of course, the golden age of another Congregationalist, Harold Wilson. Though his much misunderstood resignation from the Attlee Government in 1951 had identified him as a Bevanite, Wilson spent most of the following decade trying to build bridges with the Gaitskellite leadership, whose ...”

“... Larkin and John Wain knew one another at Oxford, but had little to do with autodidacts like Colin Wilson, John Osborne and Alan Sillitoe – this last name less often mentioned in this context than might have been expected, doubtless because Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) was published a little too late to be fitted into the fashionable ...”

“... 18th birthday, he had published a learned edition with Cambridge. It won laudatory reviews from Edmund Gosse, George Saintsbury and others. Surely a future stretched ahead in which Sparrow was destined to be a great scholar and man of letters, perhaps a good minor poet? Who could have predicted that when this learned and precocious adolescent had become an ...”

“... and poems. He had eventually to get rid of the ‘dismal box’ and he gave it, still locked, to Edmund Gosse. It was Gosse who later brought out the Poetical Works of Beddoes that Kelsall had dreamed ...”

“... and its impact on Europe, largely, though not entirely, through the work of archaeologists. David Wilson, Director of the British Museum, is among the most distinguished of these, and the exhibition which he and his pupils have mounted there (until 20 July) quite properly commemorates their achievement and that of their Scandinavian colleagues. This, in ...”

“... recognised by contemporaries: ‘one of the great minds and imaginations of our day’, Edmund Wilson wrote in the 1920s, ‘absolutely comparable’ to ‘the Nietzsches, the Tolstoys, the Wagners and the Ibsens of a previous generation’.All literary magnitudes are finite. In the case of great writers, it is understandable that their vices ...”

“... made by Indian cooks in which ‘many condiments of different flavours’ were blended.In 1845, Edmund White, the author of another cookery book, wrote that a British curry was ‘nothing more than a bad stew’. The spice mix was not tempered or fried, but thrown raw over the stock or water. To make matters worse, these stews were thickened with a flour ...”

“... have always had greater prominence than her writings on education or her pamphleteering stabs at Edmund Burke, who once described her as a ‘republican virago’.Catharine Macaulay was born Catharine Sawbridge in 1731, and died in 1791 as Catharine Graham. She grew up in a prosperous Kentish household, where she was given the run of the fine library. Those ...”

“... deep in Texas.’ He started training as a pilot. ‘Flying is pretty dull,’ he wrote to Edmund Wilson, ‘and I’m bad at it.’ At the beginning of 1943 he was moved to an air force training base near Wichita Falls, where, as Swift writes, ‘he worked in the mail room and was later transferred to the Interviewing and Classification ...”

“... virtuoso and Grand Tourist. He was first drawn to the subject by the Roman landscapes of Richard Wilson; published a book on Wilson’s then little-known drawings; and went on to annotate the letters written from Rome in 1757 by a minor British painter who had mentioned Wilson and other ...”