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“... through the reductionist lenses of colour and colourlessness. She leans heavily on Raymond Williams’s notion of a ‘structure of feeling’ which supposedly defines the ‘particular and characteristic colour of a period’. What Williams intended by ‘colour’ was ever-changing mood, constant only in its ...”

“... supposedly tried to disguise or minimise this fact, first and foremost E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams. (He takes special delight in exposing Thompsonian heroes such as William Cobbett and William Blake as racists and misogynists, less convincingly in the second case.) How can contempt be overcome? How can low and abused subjects become equal and ...”

“... The new generation of ‘cultural materialists’, however (the term is borrowed from Raymond Williams, who contributes an afterword), are much more suspicious of ‘high culture’. In his introduction to Political Shakespeare, Jonathan Dollimore analyses a tripartite pattern in ideological conflicts of consolidation, subversion and containment. In ...”

“... circles and scenes.One place where this crossover logic was always embraced was the Loft, run by David Mancuso. On any given night, the playlist might include club hits like Taana Gardner’s ‘Heartbeat’, the Peech Boys’ ‘Don’t Make Me Wait’ or Fingers Inc’s ‘Mystery of Love’; but you’d also likely hear Marianne Faithfull and Yoko ...”

“... to literary examples, Manning traces the provincialising of Calvinist attitudes in the writings of David Hume, Jonathan Edwards, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others. Far from a mechanical application of rigid doctrinal categories, Manning’s thoughtful critique shows how contradictory attitudes can arise out of, and in reaction ...”

“... for regular support. Does the SDP in Britain signify, as its leaders on the left such as Shirley Williams would like it to, a realignment amongst the forces of progress; or does it, on the contrary, signify the growth of an ‘anti party’, a party of protest supported by the electorate as a symbol of distrust of party politics and of the political system ...”

“... presence. He is seen by Claude Rawson as a fluent parodist in the Augustan mode, and by Carolyn Williams as a pioneer of post-colonial resistance to the hegemony of Received Standard English. As several essays here make clear, he is the poet who, above all others, forced the early historians of English literature such as Thomas Warton, Thomas Percy and ...”

“... post 13 years earlier. He died, aged 82, only six months after I glimpsed him. On the cover of David Ellis’s Memoirs of a Leavisite he is photographed standing with a tree and a bench behind him in (according to the jacket info) the very garden into which he escaped that autumn afternoon. He is wearing the same literary-critical uniform too: the baggy ...”

“... perceptual and moral insight that it might appear. ‘Against Portraits’ and ‘A Self-Portrait: David’, both from later collections, make such insecurity their theme. The poet prefers here a face half-hesitant, face at a threshold. Still, his poems remain preserved, for reasons given in ‘Against Extremity’, from more threatening instabilities of the ...”

“... bout of syllable counting, to pick up D.H. Lawrence is delightful’), Stevens and William Carlos Williams (‘both inspire greater freedom than the others, Stevens of the imagination, Williams of subject and style’). Then Schuyler says that ‘Continental European literature is, really, the big ...”

“... In 1940, after she’d gained the admiration of Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams, and had had nearly thirty of her poems published in literary journals or book collections, Elizabeth Bishop, then 28, admitted in a letter to Moore: ‘I scarcely know why I persist at all. It is really fantastic to place so much on the fact that I have written a half-dozen phrases that I can still bear to reread without too much embarrassment ...”

“... tribute to his wife, Sarah; Vassar is Matthew Vassar’s tribute to himself. Smith and Williams, in Massachusetts, sprang up to commemorate their donors. But for sheer iron-willed capriciousness and morbid narcissism, nothing comes close to Stanford – or rather, Leland Stanford Junior University, as it is still officially called. As the historian ...”

“... challenge should be made – ‘As long as there has been such a subject as philosophy,’ Bernard Williams once pointed out, ‘there have been people who hated and despised it’ – but that it so often comes from within the discipline itself. The fifth column has included Hume, who instructed us to ‘commit to the flames’ any work of inquiry that ...”

“... narrative. Many of the poets are writing long, stringy lines reminiscent of the American poet C.K. Williams, or having cartoonish fun with speech, a habit learned from Frank O’Hara (‘I think on the whole I would rather read/ Frank O’Hara than Geoffrey Chaucer,’ writes Geoff Hattersley). And it is true that a fighting politics seethes in poets like Sean ...”

“... Excalibur perhaps, links up the parts of the novel and is symbolic in its action. A Welshman, David Jones, runs away to sea, survives the sinking of the Titanic, becomes a cook in New York, marries Ludmilla, the daughter of his Russian employer, returns to Wales and the First World War. He is in Ireland during the Rebellion and, because he is posted as ...”