“... information to light. Its blurb called it ‘the only serious biography of the man himself’. Now Donald Spoto, author of The Art of Alfred Hitchcock (1976), has undertaken to show The Dark Side of Genius, on the ground that (according to his blurb) ‘the intensely private, secretive Hitchcock eluded the serious biographer until now.’ This is unfair to ...”

“... in greater depth and detail than had been possible for Darwin himself, the American psychologist Donald Campbell and others began to develop the notion that cultural evolution (including the emergence of such things as theories of cultural evolution) is also driven by a competitive process of variation and selection. Campbell called his Presidential Address ...”

“... encyclopedic memory, was a devastating and superior witness for the prosecution. This was the same Donald Card who, many years later, befriended Donald Woods and tipped him off about many of the security police machinations against him and Steve Biko. (Card was a professional policeman who became sickened by the behaviour of ...”

“... For Mann being German came first, and he learned, as Anthony Heilbut rather quaintly puts it, to read German history as one long queer epic – he alluded to Frederick the Great’s homosexuality and depicted Bismarck as ‘hysterical and high-pitched’. When considering literary history, he enjoyed couples, charging the marriage of true minds with a ...”

“... the army and was posted to Verona. A friend suggested that he visit Sirmione on Lake Garda and read Pound’s celebration of it, ‘Blandula, Tenula, Vagula’. Pound’s poem begins: ‘What hast thou, O my soul, with paradise?’ The question longs to be rhetorical – what could be more lovely than the spot he’s in? – but the longing isn’t wholly ...”

“... secreted by the mother for herself and her eggs, a kind of hatchery. It would be a challenge to read it without thinking of Mary recalling Marianne to the shell and the pair crawling inside like two cephalopods recolonising the nursery. The first stanza speaks of entrapment but in the last lines the argonaut clinging to its little edifice suggests that ...”

“... put the idea from their minds, remembering those touching and boring notices in the Times which read: ‘NM writes: Colonel Jocelyn Lethbridge – always known to his friends as “Stubby” – will be long remembered and sadly missed not only by them but by the regiment and at the club. Always one for a joke, Stubby combined unswerving loyalty with a ...”

“... for oneself as well as a source of genuinely exciting insights. Guileless souls content simply to read Jane Eyre now languished in the outer darkness, while their more glamorous colleagues, hotfoot from Paris or New Haven, brought the resources of narratology or postcolonial studies to bear on the novel.Where did this current spring from? Since three of ...”

“... primitive predication’, and we are seriously asked to shed a tear on Sitwell’s behalf when we read that ‘from 1941 to 1949, he experienced the painful wartime dearth of clothing, cigarettes and gasoline, as well as coal for heating and gas for cooking. And worse, he suffered powerfully from the abeyance of ...”

“... the sum of its inspired moments, leaving in its wake an aura, an echo; this is prose meant to be read aloud, as an expression of ‘voice’, not a resolution of plot. Paley’s characterisations are by way of monologues we hear, not individuals we see. (we ‘see’ virtually no one in these hundreds of pages of prose, have little idea what Faith looks ...”

“... banks or fuel poverty, without a bedroom tax or two-child benefit cap, Boris Johnson or Brexit, Donald Trump or Tommy Robinson; without a public sector staffing crisis, crumbling hospitals, collapsing schools or overcrowded prisons. Most important of all, for readers looking for an alternative reality in September 2020, it’s also a world without ...”

“... appearance in any of these shows – none has exactly been a retrospective – are her films about Donald Crowhurst, who set off from Devon in 1968 in his trimaran Teignmouth Electron to circumnavigate the globe single-handed, but kept reporting false co-ordinates before disappearing and leaving his boat adrift. Those mesmerising, melancholy films were at the ...”

“... Connor. The two men still detest each other from that period, and neither of them seems to have read anything except the Bible (or ‘the babble’, as they both call it) since. Falwell, though still able to please a racialist crowd while later saying, ‘Who, me?’, now claims to have been delivered by the Lord from his earlier segregationist ...”

“... what had come before. He had been a major cultural figure in China; now his poems were being read as flashbacks from his death. He was born in 1956 in Beijing, the son of a well-known poet and army officer, Gu Gong. At 12, he wrote a two-line poem, ‘One Generation’, which was to become an emblem of the new unofficial poetry: Even with these dark ...”

“... from a 1940 review of Max Miller at the Holborn Empire, attached as a footnote to ‘The Art of Donald McGill’. The same four-volume collection contains 20 pieces Orwell contributed to newspapers, anthologies and magazines while on the BBC staff, but includes nothing he wrote as a producer except for a couple of letters and memoranda. ‘I am tendering my ...”