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“... as if quite natural. There is no jolt, no place to pause and say this is no longer believable. Stephen King considers Jackson one of the great horror writers because she ‘never had to raise her voice’. There are no sudden twists in ‘The Lottery’. It appears to darken gradually, although in fact it does so at remarkable speed. Tessie’s reaction ...”

“... in March 1998, the application still awaited final approval from the Trade and Industry Secretary, Stephen Byers. (Poor man. It was going to get worse, much worse. Byers epitomised the New Labour attitude of glinting defiance; fiercely tonsured and spectacled, tight-lipped, scorched by flashbulbs in the passenger seat of a ministerial limo, assaulted by furry ...”

“... from the confusing tariff of one oligopolistic supplier to another doesn’t protect them from sharp, unpredictable swings in prices. In overseas chanceries the Thatcher doctrine came up against ambitious leaders who were no less patriotic, but not so arrogant and naive. Unlike Thatcher, they didn’t assume that if their country levelled its playing ...”

“... don’t think it is what I like, really – though I certainly admire Lowell’s.Bishop is pretty sharp so far as the influences go. I don’t see much of Stevens, though Berryman read and admired him a great deal (‘better than us; less wide’, he wrote in a eulogy for Stevens, ‘Dream Song 219’). Certainly Pound, whom Berryman not only admired but was ...”

“... treason no one could forfeit this basic ‘human right’. This new regime of rights stood in sharp contrast to unenlightened polities where there was no civil contract and where to be sovereign meant precisely to exercise unlimited authority over the bodies of subjects. Torture and various acts of making such power felt in the flesh – drawings and ...”

“... when he argues for the historical greatness and uniqueness of Laurentian culture. But his sharp observations of detail, apposite quotations and fine analyses of Botticelli’s social and cultural world hold the attention. He displays leep knowledge of literary sources and traditions as well as images. Social historians will learn much from him about ...”

“... network of global collaborators, a conspiracy of the unheard, and with one man in particular, the sharp-witted London activist Stewart Home.Home, in stark contrast to the brothers on the Celtic fringe, was a dynamo of invention, recycling Dadaist provocation into fugues of inspired counter-terror, then moving on. A suspicion lingers in the scorch marks that ...”

“... as he found exemplified by the poet David Jones when visiting him in a Harrow lodging-house with Stephen Spender, and the ‘many lives of pastiche’. But he is aware of the origin of his woes. From 4 October 1953: ‘My deepest problem. I have changed families and at a terrible cost substituted my ideal for my real one’ – an admission of 1994 which ...”

“... version of a work – say, Hyder Rollins’s Variorum edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, or Stephen Booth’s more recent critical edition. Each is a particular attempt to define a comprehensive socio-historical field for the sonnets. Their respective virtues are as much a function of their limits as of their particular strengths, both of which they ...”

“... to force some of their contributors to clean up their papers. The worst presented paper, that by Stephen Kendrick on ‘Social Change’, has a remarkable repertoire of literary bad manners: unlabelled columns in tables, tables labelled and promised but non-existent, unexplained initials. The most conspicuous weakness is the lack of a historical ...”

“... of moral fibre). ‘That anybody should be in pain and not be immediately relieved – that sharp pain should ever be inflicted upon anyone,’ bemoaned the eminent Victorian jurist, James Fitzjames Stephen, ‘shocks and scandalises people in these days.’ Assessment, as Rey recognises, is tricky. Does the founding ...”

“... remained a threat. He bolted from Oxford – this time to marry his long-term girlfriend, Ann Sharp, the intelligent and artistic daughter of a raffish RAF war hero. The couple would have three boys. His father’s latest bankruptcy had left him penniless, so Cornwell taught for a while at Edgarley Hall, a prep school in Somerset, before going back to ...”

“... let alone even the most influential works of criticism. As the founding father of New Historicism, Stephen Greenblatt made his professional reputation with Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980); but it was Will in the World (2004), his biographical account of ‘How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare’ that won him a huge advance. The established facts of ...”

“... Clarence Thomas, the most senior associate justice, was nominated in 1991 by George H.W. Bush. Stephen Breyer was nominated in 1994 by Bill Clinton, Samuel Alito in 2005 by George W. Bush, and Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latinx on the Court, in 2009 by Barack Obama, who also nominated Elena Kagan the following year. Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy ...”

“... of The Norton Anthology of English Literature’, published in Critical Inquiry in 2009, quotes Stephen Greenblatt’s emails to his Norton co-editors, telling them that Damrosch aimed to include ‘many texts by Welsh, Irish and Scottish writers, to show that multiculturalism, as it were, begins at home’.But in England itself it was too often taken for ...”