“... He might, perhaps, be classified as a One-Nation Tory: but he was the cousin and friend of Richard Crossman and perfectly at home in the company of Labour politicians. One of his hallmarks is an interest in the ideas of the Left and a readiness to address them with a measure of respect. He is, indeed, strongly reminiscent of the type of army officer in ...”

“... eminence of the Times. The first woman doctor is kept company by the first woman barrister, Ivy Williams. The first private to win a field-marshal’s baton, Sir William Robertson, is missing. Billy Smart, the circus proprietor, is in, though not Sir Alan Cobham, whose private air force introduced millions to flying, or Sir Donald Wolfit. Tom Webster, the ...”

“... to Darling. In 1972 Vogue ran a full-page portrait of Darling, Curtis and Holly Woodlawn by Richard Avedon. Darling held a heart-shaped lollipop emblazoned with the words LOVE ME. The high point of her career came when she was cast in Tennessee Williams’s Small Craft Warnings. ...”

“... writers such as Wyndham Lewis, E.E. Cummings, Ford Madox Ford, Louis Zukofsky and William Carlos Williams, but also to various editors and patrons: to the somewhat mysterious Margaret Cravens, a Paris-based piano student from Madison, Indiana, who in 1910 bestowed on Pound an annual stipend so he could concentrate on his poetry, only to commit suicide two ...”

“... That is what happened to rock music in the late 1960s, when sophisticated critics decided, as Richard Poirier put it, to start ‘learning from the Beatles’. It is what happened to comics, too, in the early 1990s, when the Pulitzer Prize committee invented an award for Art Spiegelman’s Maus. And it has happened to science fiction, where the anointed ...”

“... Cambridge. On parade (on King’s Parade in fact) just after ten, where the calming presence of Richard Lloyd Morgan, the chaplain of King’s, waits to shepherd me to the Senior Common Room. It’s already crowded with dons, some, since it’s the university sermon, presumably heads of houses.* I manage to avoid a chat by settling into a corner to con my ...”

“... monarchist. He is represented here by ‘To Penshurst’, with a gloss based on Raymond Williams which criticises the poem for concealing its politics behind apparently ‘natural’ images. But there is some force in Alastair Fowler’s counter-argument that Jonson’s poem, far from excluding labour, helped to pioneer in England a Georgic ...”

“... of academic moral philosophy such as Annette Baier, J.B. Schneewind, Charles Taylor and Bernard Williams, suggests the question: since the classic Kantian opposition between morality and prudence was formulated precisely in terms of the opposition between an appeal to principle and an appeal to expediency, is there any point in keeping the term ...”

“... posed by the practical application of Bentham’s celebrated maxim. Yet decades after Bernard Williams pronounced that ‘the day cannot be too far off in which we hear no more of it,’ Richard Layard, in a book with the title of Happiness, holds out the vision of a Benthamite utopia in which the pursuit of ...”

“... eager to find proof of the righteousness of their colonial project. The Harvard minister Samuel Williams went round New England collecting plant specimens, plunging thermometers into deep-water wells and tracking the migratory patterns of birds, in order to confirm his theory that the arrival of Christianity and industry on the continent had induced a more ...”

“... stories. I never saw the programmes, but I believe some quite good writers, like Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson, contributed. Despite my lack of familiarity with the stories, I do quite well with this machine. Old machines with their slowed-down responses are generally easier to win on – unless, that is, one or two of the flippers have seized up. The ...”

“... popular in the late 1960s, but in plot and style it also resembles the early work of John A. Williams, whose novel The Angry Ones (1960) skewered the publishing industry for its liberal-sounding but ultimately empty racial politics.Busby situates herself in a long line of editors and anthologists tasked not only with bringing the work of Black writers ...”

“... the US as a sinister maritime republic with an all-powerful navy (Ahab is a fighting Quaker like Richard Nixon), Marvell hints at what the future may hold for a Commonwealth that has no institutional continuity. The theme of wounded male narcissism – the mower on a hot day mown, self-injured – may be one way of giving imaginative shape to what it feels ...”

“... being republished now with the open aim of reaching the sizeable audience that resurrected John Williams’s Stoner and Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road. All three books share an interest in sad marriages and a certain amount of diffuse self-pity, but strenuous Flaubertian realism as practised on a mid-20th-century ...”

“... had a particularly intimate relationship with power. But one of the fascinating paradoxes of Richard Aldous’s biography is how slight Schlesinger’s influence in Washington actually was, despite his own pride in it, when compared to his influence on the American reading public, which he counted for nothing. In his later years, Schlesinger was best ...”