“... suddenly among us. Oppen and Rakosi returned after their long silences; Zukofsky was published by major presses; Bunting produced his masterpiece, Briggflatts; in Wisconsin, the reclusive Lorine Niedecker was writing her best work. And Reznikoff was with them. There were readings, interviews, a prize or two. In 1974, the Black Sparrow Press began a programme ...”

“... tmeses and promiscuously embracing parentheses’ resemble the texts he read as a Greek major at Harvard. The first passage here is by Sappho; the second by Cummings: [        ] Her[ Man[ And see[ms These girls al[l Topmost [ Wanders [ [            ] these [ [                ] Partner [ Own cousin [ Elbows ...”

“... sur l’origine et la nature du beau in an article on the Hollywood comedy directors John Hughes and Judd Apatow, while Cyril Béghin compares a shot in Avatar to Tintoretto’s The Finding of the Body of St Mark. The most famous of Cahiers’ early statements – and the one that most directly affected film history – was Truffaut’s 1954 ...”

“... of The Last English Poachers, written by Bob, his son Brian (also a poacher) and a ghost called John McDonald, is more punk than its predecessors’. The Robin Hood aspect is to the fore. The Toveys see themselves as the rural frontline in the class war, and their book is full of contempt for rural toffs, or ‘ya-yas’, also called ‘saddle-bumpers’ by ...”

“... in the wetness and reach safety in the cafeteria at the summit. But a 34-year-old man called John Mattinson who left the same café half an hour later was struck by lightning and died. When she read about it in the newspaper, Meades’s mother said: ‘Well, if you will stand on a cairn in a thunderstorm …’ True to his interest in ...”

“... to get over nine hundred pages out of them. (For his mere 336 pages Best casts much wider.) John Morley and William Harcourt, whom Jenkins toyed with doing before deciding on the big ‘un, would have required far more research. There is also clearly a market for Churchilliana, not only in Britain but in the US (for which Jenkins’s glossary of British ...”

“... of life.’ Barker’s precocity was impressive, and attracted the attention and patronage of John Middleton Murry, T.S. Eliot and Edwin Muir. Murry gave the 19-year-old poet two books to review for the Adelphi on the strength of some pages of diary (later worked up into the first novel) and Barker had published in New Verse, Criterion and the Listener at ...”

“... and annoyed to be asked to write the official biography. It was largely due to his brother John, the art historian who became director of the Victoria & Albert Museum, that Pope-Hennessy was persuaded to take the commission. Royalty, John argued, was ‘an endangered species’ and this was an opportunity to examine ...”

“... Hitchin’, was qualified. ‘Heaven: Evenings and Weekends Only’ was closer to the truth. The major employer, the Spirella corset factory, could provide work for only a fraction of the intrepid experimentalists of the new life. A total rupture was a chimera. Places are fluid and ambiguous. They keep on changing. They are forced into fresh roles. Their ...”

“... biography that navigates the relationship between Jews, art and money in the years around 1900.John Singer Sargent seems to be in fashion: his ‘dollar princesses’ are on display at Kenwood House (until 5 October); his early years are the subject of a major show at the Musée d’Orsay, opening this month. For a long ...”

“... fighting to get back my little joke, or whatever you might call it – it is more like a sergeant-major barking out at the audience: ‘laugh.’ I was allowed this paltry little thing back, and it did make the only laugh in the show. The point of this anecdote, may I tiresomely explain, is that the whole thing had become alarmingly more serious than we had ...”

“... from so many provenances – English, American, French and German – that his book will be a major resource for fellow historians for a long time. He makes an important remark about the relation between his evidence and his conclusions at the outset of Education of the Senses: ‘The search for documentation, the construction of causal patterns, the ...”

“... the obligation of men to perform their political covenants. And it was there that the Levellers John Wildman and Maximilian Petty mounted the fundamental challenge to the constitution that would be rewarded by the abolition of monarchy and the House of Lords two years later. Even the sophisticated qualifications of modern scholarship, which have dwelled on ...”

“... wore bowler hats and most men wore stiff collars; women did not wear trousers. London was still a major centre of manufacturing and its docks were at the heart of global trade networks. People who lived in the inner city were generally poor, and they got richer as you went further out into the green and pleasant suburbs. All of this changed over the following ...”

“... of the village idiot. Brecht admired Lorre’s tadpoleish looks and he was soon directing him in major roles. He starred, for example, in Mann ist Mann at the same time as he was filming M. His first substantial Brechtian role was in a controversial play written by Brecht’s protégée Marieluise Fleisser called Pioniere in Ingolstadt. The play’s main ...”