“... onto our glory. Meanwhile, though, history hadn’t stopped. It was being made and written; and in Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up! (1994), it found the novel it was hiding from. This book is a brilliantly sustained spoof of many things: old film comedies, old detective stories, old chatty novels, stage farces – not everyone would connect Jean Cocteau with ...”

“... into the Beatnik era, establishing important transatlantic connections with Robert Creeley, Jonathan Williams, Lorine Niedecker and others. The break-up of his first marriage in 1964 terminated this period of relative stability, initiating the chapter of uncertainty that coincided with his first letters to Stephen Bann. At no stage in Finlay’s ...”

“... it to thorough-going methodological examination.’ (OED2 is a fusion of the 1933 OED1 and the post-1957 Supplements.) The study to which Brewer refers is a ‘little-known but revelatory book by Jürgen Schäfer on OED documentation’. Brewer endorsed Schäfer’s caveat that ‘the increasing discrepancy between the methods used at that ...”

“... of the last year. The portmanteau terms for these developments are ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’, and they were made possible by the retreat from a general agora of public debate into separate ideological bunkers. In the open air, fake news can be debated and exposed; on Facebook, if you aren’t a member of the community being served the ...”

“... trees, diagonally connects the city to the village at the foot of the hill. This village lost its post office in the 1990s, and its only surviving commercial enterprise, beside the pub and the shop selling ‘gifts and country antiques’, is a Shell station mini-supermarket. Old farm workers’ cottages, built from the nearest and cheapest materials to hand ...”

“... a Professor of Modern Literature and Theory – and has already written reassuring books on Post-Modernist Culture and Theory and Cultural Value. In Dumbstruck he has combined his skills as a literary truffle-hound with the resources of Theory to compile a fascinating inventory of the various meanings of ventriloquism, strung together to make some kind ...”

“... former Methodist seminary in New Jersey) and overdetermined (the University of Reading). But if post-colonialism and women’s studies are anything to go by, no academic discipline can really be said to have arrived until it receives the final mark of legitimacy: a Routledge Reader. At a time when library budget cuts have left the supply of original ...”

“... campus: the collapse of the liberal arts model under the pressures of political correctness, post-structuralist theory and tenure difficulties has been explored with varying degrees of insight by writers as different as Francine Prose, Philip Roth, James Hynes and even Jonathan Franzen in the opening pages of The ...”

“... One​ of Jonathan Swift’s first published poems was a piece of 18 lines called ‘A Description of the Morning’. It was printed anonymously in an April 1709 edition of the Tatler, which in its original incarnation took an interest in literary criticism, history and philosophy as well as society gossip. Richard Steele, the magazine’s editor and a friend of Swift’s, puffed the poet and his work in an introduction ...”

“... familiar approach to understanding Soviet nationality issues is via Russia, and this is the path Jonathan Brunstedt follows. His book examines the long-running ideological debates among Soviet theorists and propagandists on Russia’s place in the Soviet Union. More particularly, it addresses the question of whether the Soviet victory in the Second World War ...”

“... on their rucksacks as they criss-crossed Europe meeting up with pen pals and old army buddies. Jonathan Purkis, a self-described ‘vagabond sociologist’, sees hitchhiking as the inheritor of a long tradition celebrating self-sufficient travel, dating back to Lao Tzu’s aphorisms (the journey as more important than the destination) and medieval ...”

“... was a ‘faggot’ and insisting that there was nothing faggotty about his own friendship with Jonathan. He quotes David’s lament for Saul and Jonathan, only to interrupt it with: ‘You see? I do call him a brother, don’t I?’ The 20th-century nervousness about David’s feelings for other men is matched by the ...”

“... with death. No scene is too humdrum to be energised by the ubiquity of death. In Ghost MacIndoe, Jonathan Buckley introduces the war in the fifth line with the sentence: ‘The postman tipped his helmet to Alexander’s mother.’ The postman wears a helmet? Something is out there trying to kill postmen? That’s war, that is. The British Army still ...”

“... who ‘could indeed be purchased and owned, especially if treated well’. The theologian Jonathan Edwards, who completed a degree at Yale College in 1720, was a slaveholder like many of his peers, even though, as Blight points out, he saw ‘human history as a drama between good and evil played out before the “moral government” of an ...”

“... Some, such as his Highgate schoolmaster T.S. Eliot and his Oxford nemesis C.S. Lewis, had been in post since his youth, but new figures continually joined them. One was Nikolaus Pevsner, who by some quirk of mandarin humour was knighted the same year as Betjeman. Hillier struggles, unconvincingly, to find the roots of Betjeman’s unflinching hatred for the ...”