“... not rejoice at the vict-ories of the Boers or grieve about their defeats, after all they kill the English soldiers too’. But he couldn’t help it: ‘I am glad when I read about the defeats of the British, it cheers my soul.’ Russian conservatives were pro-Boer not only for the usual nationalist, anti-British reasons but because they thought the Boers ...”

“... the infallible cure for athlete’s foot: all reproduce when passed from one person to another. Richard Dawkins has called such reproducing ideas ‘memes’. Runciman’s insight has been to see that Darwinian ‘things’ can also be whatever occurs when an individual finds him or herself to be a member of a group. What then occurs are ‘social ...”

“... and work as separate units. At worst, they read like a cross between R.D. Laing’s case-notes and Richard Aldington’s Imagism. At best, they have a force and integrity which none of the other poets associated with the Review, and few poets since, have come close to matching. The problem, as Hamilton concedes in his preface, is that these 50 poems encompass ...”

“... theory. Given this comparative framework, we can begin to ask new questions about the English reaction to Darwin. Surely the most pressing task is to look at the socialist response at home. We already have pointers. Malcolm Kottler in his essay shows that even Wallace (who studied in Mechanics Institutes and socialist Halls of Science), supposedly ...”

“... is caught and let loose for the pleasure of chasing it down again. With every chorus Bob Dylan and Richard Manuel lift their voices and then abandon them, stranding their words right at the edge of a cliff, suspending the sound in dead silence until the next verse begins. It’s a stark, shuddering effect, the pleasure cut like a heater in a cheap hotel ...”

“... historical vision. Like Kafka, whose work she played a major role in having translated into English, she used matter-of-fact prose to dramatise a ‘nightmare world’ in which arbitrary decrees are palmed off as sacred laws. For better or worse, Arendt’s vision long ago lost its shocking novelty. Thanks to the memoirs of survivors like Jean ...”

“... is successfully air-brushed by an elegant Post-Modern presentation. Mitchell, who teaches English and art at Chicago University, and is an editor of Critical Inquiry (the Debrett’s of cultural and critical studies), emerges from this book as a kind of ‘Pomosaurus’ or perhaps even a ‘thesaurus’ (a creature nimble with multiple meanings). The ...”

“... agenda. Medievalist Wissenschaft (the term has scientific connotations largely absent from the English word ‘scholarship’) was grounded in philology. Ethnic identity was defined by linguistic identity: a German was the speaker of a Germanic language and German identity thus extended to Spain, North Africa, the Netherlands and Italy – areas that had ...”

“... copy of Chase’s book, the officers of the Essex ‘knew not that for more than twenty years the English … had been resident in Tahiti; & that in the same year of the shipwreck – 1820 – it was entirely safe.’ The two mates argued for a different plan: the three boats would sail south for 1500 miles, until they were out of the trades and into a belt ...”

“... and the crumbling of services on a scale that would have gladdened the ruralist heart of a Richard Jefferies. Five years ago, Roy Porter still diagnosed ‘a downward spiral of infrastructural and human problems that will prove hard to halt’. Yet now, when London has slipped way down the table of city-sizes and tours round the eerie magnificence of ...”

“... Beckett’s first French novel. The cognates Muldoon finds for Beckett’s name are Old Irish and English, becc and boc, which sound like characters from one of the late plays. He neglects Beckett’s French Huguenot background, which the author himself used as a source of onomastics in the matter of his name. At one point in Eleutheria a disgusted spectator ...”

“... basis of Taylor’s admiration is the Chestertonian contention that Thackeray ‘was the greatest English writer’ – writer, you note, not novelist – ‘of the 19th century. And perhaps of all time.’ He rejects the ‘change of heart’ thesis and has little time for the ‘buried life’ approach. There is no extended analysis of the ...”

“... pay and to return $250,000 to the Trust. It was a spectacularly extravagant decision to commission Richard Meier in 1984 to build a new Getty Center – including the chief museum, the Research Institute and the Conservation Center – as a cluster of buildings on a hilltop in Brentwood accessible only (for ordinary visitors and most staff) by a steep ...”

“... In most Shakespeare biographies Ann has no life; while her husband is off changing the course of English literature (when not dallying with dark ladies and young men) she sits at home, unoccupied for thirty years or so, awaiting his return. Many even doubt whether she could read or write, while few have given much thought to how she might have been ...”

“... to and from the rest of his body. Imagine that. Or imagine people who speak a language just like English, except that when they are tired they talk of coming down with ‘the fatigues’. Or that two coffee tasters have come to dislike the house blend, but one of them says the taste has changed while the other says he no longer likes it. What should we say ...”