“... to write directly about paintings if they do not care about them too much. Nothing in the mass of John Koethe’s verse and philosophical prose, for instance, suggests that paintings haunted him continually in anything like the way they did Herbert. (If I do him an injustice, I apologise.) But this seems to have meant that when he spent an hour or two with ...”

“... consciously controlled professional technique. It was a struggle away from everything Vaughan Williams seemed to stand for.’ Vaughan Williams taught composition at the RCM, but Britten bypassed him anyway. Since the age of 14 he had been having lessons with Frank Bridge; his mother would take him to London in the ...”

“... the Obscure resembles Dickensian black comedy turned absurdist, the epitaphic aspirations of a John Chivery in Little Dorrit chilled to the bone, then the receding acknowledgment of Hades-bound presences in the narrative coda of The Newcomes provides the textual obverse of Amy Dorrit’s confidence in closural inscription, which seems for her the ...”

“... as the Venus de Milo, and with a tear running down her cheek? I can only guess why Shirley Williams is carrying a copy of the News Chronicle, or why Jimmy Hill has an Arab headdress, or why Lord Home stands bat in hand before a broken wicket. Craig Brown says that in his caricatures Boxer mixed ‘the base and the suave’, but there is not a lot of ...”

“... an hour along Highway 91 through the Nevada desert. Shortly after five o’clock, the writer Mason Williams rolled down the passenger window, and threw out a Royal Model X typewriter. Patrick Blackwell photographed the results. Although Wershler-Henry devotes twenty pages or so to ‘the typewriter girl’ and ‘Remington priestesses’, and notes that ...”

“... as ‘a leading influence’ on his country’s writing, his world, like that of William Carlos Williams, seems uninterested in academe but absorbed by family, business and event. There is the poem on the skeleton of the Great Moa – an avian prodigy, long extinct – in the Canterbury Museum at Christchurch; a marvellous one on a 90-year-old mountaineer ...”

“... population? Invent a pessimistic dystopia. It is this dangerous facility that Raymond Williams refers to when he terms SF ‘liberated and promiscuous’. Its profundities are too painlessly arrived at. With Genetha, Roy Heath completes his Guyana trilogy following the fortunes of the Armstrong family to their dismal conclusion. The first ...”

“... his dubiously broad sense) has been uprooted. All we are told is that Wittgenstein (along with John Dewey) illustrates the way ‘philosophical reflection which is completely honest can unsettle our prejudices and our pet convictions and our blind spots without flashy claims to deconstruct truth itself or the world itself’. Surely he is a lot more ...”

“... him in the 1750s. So too, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, agnostic clerics such as John Robinson, the author of Honest to God, David Jenkins, the controversial bishop of Durham, the Scots Episcopalian bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, and the Anglican atheist Don Cupitt belong more convincingly in liberal ranks than with authentic enemies ...”

“... so powerful an influence on who you are. The ‘dispossessed/ and half-tamed Englishman’ of ‘John Maydew or The Allotment’ returns from war to find that he must choose between ‘an England, profitlessly green’ and a landscape where           slag in lavafolds rolls beneath him. The first part of the poem seems to be spoken to the man in ...”

“... The dominant ideas were principally extracted from the pontifical utterances of ‘sages’, in John Holloway’s expression, like Carlyle, Mill, Ruskin, Bagehot, Froude, Huxley, Morley, Arnold. The team-written Wellesley Index project went on from this quest to anatomise the élite Victorian mind at a lower archaeological level than that of the pre-eminent ...”

“... America. He ignored also Crane’s metrical strictness, and under the influence of William Carlos Williams looked for ‘the open form ... and variable breath-stop length for verse measurement, that enabled him to write “Howl”.’ He fell in love with Kerouac but did not dare to make a sexual approach, and had his first experience with a forty-year-old ...”

“... industry. Born to the old world (‘taste was my cultural capital, boiled down to a syrup’), John Seabrook, a critic at large for the New Yorker, wanders in the new, but this desert of ‘Nobrow’ – where the old ‘brow’ distinctions no longer seem to apply – is not so arid to him. In fact he drinks more deeply at the oases of Nobrow culture (a ...”

“... epigraph: ‘I had not known sin, but by the law.’ He always had gurus – Gerald Heard, Charles Williams, Georg Groddeck, Homer Lane. Some quietly faded away, but with a few he enjoyed an enduring sympathy: Forster and Virginia Woolf, for instance, and Eliot, with the respect due to the publisher of his first book of poems, but staying well short of ...”

“... I don’t want to pretend that Machiavelli was actually a classic liberal, a precursor of John Locke, celebrating individual rights, the public/private distinction and the rule of law. The sanguine suggestion that a new ruler might make himself secure in regard to the political class by ‘doing away with them’ is enough to dispel any thought of ...”