“... of Joshua Reynolds: again, if one does not immediately connect Wind with Reynolds, it should be pointed out that in the relevant entry in the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, Wind supplies more items than any other secondary authority. Some of these items are fairly slight, but even a short note on Blake and Reynolds, dating from ...”

“... and it is his apparent formlessness which guarantees him this place. Quite often he is rejected by students on first acquaintance, partly through a priggishness which will allow only the young to talk dirty. But he comes into his own in the graduate school and the Zapp-it-to-me international seminars, where priggishness takes more unnatural and exclusive ...”

“... which rightfully belong to the corpus of his work. It is significant that he insisted that he not be named on this one occasion – for an interview about philosophy. In many respects Foucault was indeed a masked philosopher. In his writings, his philosophical position usually remains implicit or presupposed. Only in The Archaeology of Knowledge did he ...”

“... my mind for some time afterwards. Why, I could not, for the life of me, understand. It wouldn’t be until 1872, when the first volume of John Forster’s biography appeared, that Dickens’s wife and children learned about the pots of boot blacking he’d covered (‘first with a piece of oil paper, and then with a piece of blue paper’) for ten hours a ...”

“... from government: from the government, that is, of the rump UK, minus Scotland. The reason is that David Cameron, attempting to outflank the SNP during a midwinter silly season offensive, has managed to provoke Scotland’s first minister, Alex Salmond, into a daring dash for independence. Salmond is not – as the English fail miserably to understand – an ...”

“... issue of 1960, Epoch, a quarterly published at Cornell, carried ‘The River Jordan’, a story by ‘Donald R. DeLillo’. It tells of a day in the life of Emil Burke, a mad Manhattan septuagenarian who leads a storefront chapel called the Psychic Church of the Crucified Christ, with a congregation of four. In the morning he descends to the Times Square ...”

“... use of existing texts. Constraint depends on mathematical or rule-bound procedures, as practised by the Oulipo. (US and Canadian writers seem to be on an Oulipo kick: Google ‘noulipo’, i.e. new Oulipo, for proof.) These methods let writers treat words and letters not as means to expression but as things to ...”

“... described a snowy field over which a light wind was blowing; tiny particles of snow were picked up by the wind and carried short distances in complicated patterns, so that the way the wind blew was suddenly visible, in the same way that dye in water makes visible the flow of hidden currents. Part of the test was, supposedly, to determine when the passage would ...”

“... In the penultimate chapter of David Copperfield, David and Agnes, after ten years of uneventful but blissful marriage – ‘I had advanced in fame and fortune, my domestic joy was perfect’ – are sitting by the fire in their house in London, one night in spring, when they receive a visit from an elderly stranger ...”

“... bounces off him. Intent and also wary. ‘Wherever he was,’ Spender declared, ‘seemed to me to be the trenches’: dug in, on guard, bayonet fixed. Not easy to close with. Isherwood is a very long, densely detailed book which contains a large amount of valuable new information. It tracks, particularly in its account of the early 1930s, much of the same ...”

“... time, find John Cowper instantly available in the heart of London, at the Village Bookshop, hard by Piccadilly Circus, that alternative campus. There is here a bust of John Cowper, with large pictures of his photogenic face. There is a wall of his books which (with a few of T. F.’s and Llewellyn’s offering fraternal support) seem to dominate over the ...”

“... Here is a miscellany of books, written before the 1980 Party Conference by authors who have some concern about the future of the Labour Party. Healey’s is a magnificent picture-book strung on a slender autobiographical thread, which he describes as being ‘partly about photography, partly about the world and partly about me ...”

“... In March​ 1960, Konrad Adenauer, the chancellor of West Germany, met his Israeli counterpart, David Ben-Gurion, in New York. Eight years earlier, Germany had agreed to pay millions of marks in reparations to Israel, but the two countries had yet to establish diplomatic relations. Adenauer’s language at their meeting was unambiguous: Israel, he said, is a ‘fortress of the West’ and ‘I can already now tell you that we will help you, we will not leave you alone ...”

“... in pursuit of someone or something, or were being pursued themselves. These characters tended to be outsiders – ‘knuckle men’, Gypsies, tortured rock stars – who were in touch with the ‘old ways’ (sometimes the ‘auld ways’) and lived in tune with nature. They dug and they worked the land and they fought and they snared rabbits, and they were ...”

“... Australia to missile warheads targeted across the North Pole. They influence, and are influenced by, the price of sugar in Brazil and the political status of the Golan Heights. They are prime movers of the world of today. Peter Pringle, formerly of the Sunday Times, now of the Observer, and James Spigelman, with civil service experience inside Gough ...”