“... mutual regard between the two leaders. Eden’s turn against Nasser came with the dismissal of Sir John Glubb as Chief of Staff of the Arab Legion in March 1956. Glubb Pasha, writes Kyle, ‘was a British newspaper reader’s legend’. With his fall the reality of Britain’s diminished role in the Middle East suddenly struck home. Eden, it should be ...”

“... of unintended promotion takes a subtler form in the case of Amis’s fictional counter-hero, John Self, the money-glutton and pornographer, a man with as much interior culture as a massage parlour. The author describes this crass compendium of gross appetites so brilliantly, and with such inventive wit, that the ...”

“... and cultural – the US far exceeds all other nations. It accounts for one-third of the world’s gross domestic product and military spending. Even before the Iraq war, it had more than 700 military installations overseas. It is not surprising that in such circumstances, many Americans feel that the country can impose its will on the rest of the ...”

“... the novel beyond its wildest dreams.’ James’s purge was designed to expel two kinds of gross matter – concepts, and common factuality. Mary McCarthy darkly suspects a kind of snobbery in his association of the two. ‘I do not easily see what these tabooed subjects have in common, unless they were familiar to most people and hence bore the trace ...”

“... is a true Down Under chunderer. Is the author technicolour-yawning too, in this straining mix of gross comedy, outlandish allegory and ambivalent nostalgia? Around this time Bail noted Keats’s advice to Shelley, which he found feathering the ‘uncomfortable nest’ of another recluse, the Sydney painter ...”

“... had treated of them dispersed. For another, they were increasingly caricatured as decadent and gross: pursuit of bathhouse boys was seen as a symptom of undesirable excess. And, as Plutarch emphasised, the role of the boy in such relations came to be thought of as anomalous (the pleasures lacked reciprocity) and without honour. To what did these ...”

“... latter in terms of the former. But he has a point even so. The speech of American youth – weird, gross, bizarre, wicked, scary – is certainly the discourse of Gothic, which before Modernism arrived on the scene was the most resourceful antagonist of literary realism we could muster. Malevolent barons, lascivious monks, victimised virgins, shaggy ...”

“... human context, in the midst of a like-minded radical intelligentsia: William Frend, George Dyer, John Thelwall, Basil Montagu, John Tweddell, Felix Vaughan, James Losh, Joseph Fawcett. Roe’s research has been strenuous, his attention to detail earnest, and his book will be useful. But it will not be quite as useful as ...”

“... assumption – that in this part of the world homosexual behaviour was prosecuted only in cases of gross social infraction, that the death penalty deterred reporting or that the relative unpopularity of torture in England meant that fewer names were betrayed – fail to stack up. The simpler reading is true: such broad absence of evidence really is evidence of ...”

“... health’ when Johnson first came to Streatham after the Thrales found him ‘on his knees before John Delap, an Anglican clergyman and minor playwright, “beseeching God to continue him in the use of his understanding”’ in terms so ‘pathetic’ that Henry Thrale ‘involuntarily lifted up one hand to shut his mouth, from provocation at hearing a man ...”

“... path-breaking book, Animals Men and Morals (1971), edited by Stanley and Roslind Godlovitch and John Harris. Singer acknowledges his debt to this pivotal work as well as to personal contact with some of the contributors, and his own 1975 book, of which there is now a welcome second edition, is largely a sustained working-out of the moral perspective ...”

“... cheap, and indeed looks very cheap as long as the cost of maintaining libraries is not counted in. John Burrows’s project of putting a dozen novels onto a computer was plainly from the first going to prove expensive. When one begins to cost Burrows’s travel, subsistence overseas, and time, together with computer-time, programmer-time and secretarial ...”

“... United States who are wedded to less egalitarian premises. Confident of the obvious fairness of John Rawls’s ‘difference principle’, which states that inequalities are not to be abolished but arranged so that they are of the greatest benefit to the least advantaged, philosophers like Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge have sought to apply Rawls’s theory ...”

“... albeit with some cyborg features, rather than taking forward what Mirowski reads as the vision of John von Neumann (mathematician, polymath, weaponeer, Cold War hawk, pioneer computer scientist, game theorist) of a fully cyborg economics, one which ‘appreciated the significance of the computer as an information processor for a reconceptualisation of the ...”

“... one thought it odd that the real inner cabinet not only did not include the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, but comprised four spinners and only two responsible ministers. As Rawnsley points out, the curious thing about Blair is that, however much he wants to reject ideology, he is also endlessly eager to explain himself, to insist that there is a big ...”