“... of influence, but baseball, too, has spread around the globe. In an essay in the latest edition, Geoffrey Nunberg notes that ‘it is rare to find a single page of an English-language novel or newspaper that does not reveal what nation it was written in,’ and although the Norton does not include a single text from its own country of publication – unless ...”

“... it was in its supposed heyday, critics were known mostly for the ferocity of their prejudices. Geoffrey Hartman, though, has never been a critic with animus. He has been forceful in his views without being disparaging of others in a profession with few niches and great rivalries. He has gone on making an exemplary case for close reading and the value of ...”

“... later to one of his old fellow-robbers who, without missing a beat, replied: ‘Not one of her best.’) The dark side of the robbery, of course, was what happened to Jack Mills. Here’s Reynolds on the subject: I regretted what had happened to Mills but I believe it was exaggerated out of all proportion ... Although I wasn’t there (on the train ...”

“... Wales and by immigrants from the ‘New Commonwealth’. Although their chapter contains about the best short history I have yet seen of Ulster’s troubles from 1968 to date, I am not myself persuaded that the authors have got their perspectives right. Admittedly, the title ‘United Kingdom’ is a misnomer, so long as the Northern Irish problem remains ...”

“... as more mainstream machine-learning techniques.‘Other methods … worked a little bit better,’ Geoffrey Hinton, a leading proponent of neural networks, told Wired magazine in 2019. ‘We thought it was … because we didn’t have quite the right algorithms.’ But as things turned out, ‘it was mainly a question of scale’: early neural networks just ...”

“... energy of Candide, as it rushes from one extreme situation to another. The new translation by Geoffrey Brock is wonderfully faithful to Collodi’s speed and vigour. Until now, the best-known modern translation has been Ann Lawson Lucas’s, and in several respects it is still a better buy, thanks to Lucas’s detailed ...”

“... industry over the span of my grandmother’s life is fairly remarkable. In 1916, according to Geoffrey Jones, a business historian, only ‘one fifth of Americans may have used any toiletry or cosmetics.’ This would mean that four fifths of Americans used neither toothpaste nor shampoo, never mind moisturiser or deodorant, lipstick or hair gel. In ...”

“... of Dear Bill letters, is a gleeful addition to the canon); and it has employed some of the best cartoonists around. Marnham is disappointingly uninformative on the graphic side of the Eye, which crucially helps its appeal as the adult’s comic. There’s an interesting paradox, for instance, in the fact that the magazine which published some of the ...”

“... him, though, he imagines it’s ‘a sprightly 65’. The narrator of Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), Geoffrey Braithwaite, is a sprightly 65, or thereabouts. He’s a retired, widowed doctor, whose wife, Ellen (note her initials), was serially unfaithful: in other words, he’s a sprightly updating of Charles Bovary, however much he would resist the ...”

“... diary and the letters she exchanged with her cousin Franklin Roosevelt, found and edited by Geoffrey Ward) and No Ordinary Time (Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the home front during World War Two) are products of the current obsession with the private lives of public figures. But the books about the President’s women are ...”

“... Willows, or even the ‘safe pit of blackness’ in the Dorset countryside where the narrator of Geoffrey Household’s 1939 thriller Rogue Male goes to ground. As for the bunker under the White House that Donald Trump went to ‘inspect’ on 29 May, while Black Lives Matter protesters gathered near Lafayette Park – well, think what you will about that ...”

“... Jon Stallworthy asks in the afterword to Singing School. His short answer is: ‘because, to the best of my knowledge, no one else has done so, and the schooling of poets seems a potentially rewarding subject.’ The longer answer is that ‘in the early chapters of their autobiographies, Coleridge, Hardy, Yeats, Sassoon, Graves, Day Lewis, Spender and ...”

“... in which tiny fragments of glass are assembled to form a picture – not always in the best possible taste. Mark Girouard’s biography of James Stirling is constructed by a similar procedure, an astonishing accumulation of small details, asides and memories building up to a portrait. Big Jim is vividly told and convincingly three-dimensional. And ...”

“... You​ would be hard pressed to describe Geoffrey Hill’s final work. To say it is a sort of notebook cast as a prose poem in 271 sections of greatly varying length doesn’t get you very far. In one way it is squarely in the tradition of Pope’s Dunciad (which it mentions): it is a poem about the betrayal of England, a yowl of anger and outrage at the prevailing imbecility Hill often addressed in his later works ...”

“... According to MacCarthy, ‘the first step to culture is to learn to enjoy, not to know what is best.’ Indeed, he doubted that anyone could know ‘what is best’. For his book column in the New Statesman, he had signed himself ‘Affable Hawk’, but not because he wished to suggest any hint of beakiness. His ...”