“... Keillor, David Leavitt, and John Updike, whose most luminous descriptions are located in ‘the post-pill paradise’ of pleasure, estrangement and divorce. Thus the ‘normal’, whether a word, a category or a quality, loses its Larkinesque dullness and takes on an impossibly romantic resonance in a country of sexual and racial ambiguity. With great ...”

“... commonsensical approach to the text, still exerts a palpable influence on Shakespeare scholars: Jonathan Bate’s introduction to this new edition of the Complete Works makes regular appeals to Johnson’s authority and Johnson’s precedent. The differences between the circumstances and the procedures of the two editions, however, are at least as revealing ...”

“... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...”

“... was both counterintuitive and prophetic. It was one of the first works of criticism to incorporate post-structuralist theory about the fictionality of the written ‘I’, and to weld it onto an account of how poets ought to write. It also announced a change in literary-critical taste, from Ginsberg to Prynne and Ashbery, from loosely confessional free verse ...”

“... as Dante Gabriel Rossetti. During the First World War he was offered a high-ranking political post and agents of the Ottoman Empire tried to assassinate him. He was impervious to pain and he communicated with a higher reality in trance states. His thought and his life were all of a piece. ‘Thousands of times I’ve been drawn up from the earth by the ...”

“... of capitalism). The war brought Labour to the forefront of national politics, but the first post-war election deprived it of its best-known figures. Willie Adamson, a former Fifeshire miner, happened to be around and so became Chairman of the Parliamentary Party. In 1922 MacDonald, Philip Snowden, his great rival in the Parliamentary opposition to the ...”

“... Theresa May, with the largest Conservative share of the national vote since Margaret Thatcher’s post-Falklands triumph in 1983, failed to secure a majority, while Jeremy Corbyn – reviled by most of his own MPs – made Labour competitive again, with a remarkable near 10 per cent swing in his favour. As a result, a minority Tory administration is propped ...”

“... the strange career and ultimate oblivion of this indigenous philosophy of the self-taught that Jonathan Rée’s Proletarian Philosophers is concerned. To understand who Craik was, it is necessary to go back to 1909, the year of a celebrated strike at Ruskin College, Oxford. The students of the newly-founded college – mainly miners and railwaymen, Craik ...”

“... than a little to Pynchon’s work; and in a recent essay in Harper’s magazine the young novelist Jonathan Franzen declares Pynchon a personal hero. David Foster Wallace moves beyond admiration to adulation – if not, to put it more plainly, outright imitation. It is, in fact, a virtuoso performance that has eclipsed its progenitor: Wallace out-Pynchons ...”

“... produced the news reporter as American hero – Neil Sheehan, David Halberstam, Seymour Hersch, Jonathan Schell, Peter Arnett. They reported not only the war the government did not want its citizens to see, but also the government efforts to invent a war for domestic consumption. ‘Part of the Vietnamese Seventh Infantry Division was being assigned to make ...”

“... of the lust for food, and hymnings of garlic, and John Minton’s seductive, and faintly Post-Impressionist, illustrations to Elizabeth David. Brooke, after the war, heads for the Mediterranean as fast as he possibly can, but, being Brooke, he is already deeply nostalgic for his Army days there and strives to reanimate certain epiphanic moments ...”

“... deep smoking crater formerly known as downtown Albuquerque’ and travel west through various post-apocalyptic hazards, in an attempt to reach, like virtual pioneers, the sparkling gigabyte Pacific. Jens cannot persuade Walter that the beauty and simplicity of the code he writes transcends the monstrous fantasy it is used to create. At the centre of the ...”

“... political offender, William Fuller, lost an eye there in 1702; in 1713 the printer of the Flying Post (Defoe called it the ‘Lying Post’) was almost killed in the pillory by a mob including, it was said, men in the livery of the secretary of state Henry Bolingbroke. David Edwards, the fugitive printer of the ...”

“... Book than its American manifestation does a Harvard Book. But anyone looking for the full range of post-war US poetry will have to turn elsewhere. Sharing Harold Bloom’s commitment to ‘the transcendental strain’, Vendler differs over how we should read it. What she values is less the Sublime than its epistemology. While Bloom cries up the heroic ...”

“... languages complemented, rather than competed with, each other. A different challenge is mounted by Jonathan Scott’s polemical essay, which accepts the existence and importance of a republican tradition but denies Harrington a significant place in it. Pocock, seeming less than pleased, deals easily enough with Scott’s more dismissive claims. Even so, a ...”