“... 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 ...”

“... bit as relentlessly as Alan Clark fought for animals in leg traps. He took on civil servants, Post Office mandarins, and was even prepared to defy the Queen herself. Then one day Harold Wilson summoned him and put a stop to the whole business. The Queen’s head remains to this day. In Tony Benn’s memoirs it is difficult to find a single other ...”

“... years on, HMS Pinafore is still afloat. Refitted and relaunched by directors like Joseph Papp, Jonathan Miller, Ken Russell and Mark Savage as post-copyright, post-D’Oyly Carte G&S, not only Pinafore, but The Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado and Princess Ida too have been successfully ...”

“... our freedom. This brings us to another bee in Waugh’s bonnet. He disapproved strongly of the use post-war Britain made of her freedom. Gallagher speaks of the ‘defence of the upper classes and the offensive against the lower which characterised Waugh’s post-1945 career’. The campaign cannot have done a lot to endear ...”

“... and technological danger conspire to break up two families, throwing them into a ‘malevolent, post-electrical silence’. Though the electrocution and the couple-swap are carefully handled, Moody keeps a chilly distance from his adult characters. Rather than examine their feelings directly, he prefers to offer eloquent sumaries: ‘Like so many of the ...”

“... It is odd how much decades matter. The Twenties evoke an unmistakable image of self-consciously post-war modernity and frivolity; the Thirties of ideological polarisation in the face of the twin challenge of depression and dictatorship; the Forties of plain living and high thinking about the world after Hitler; the Fifties of affluence and complacency and the end of ideology ...”

“... nursing’. Lodge, however, is not your wilder type of structuralist, and has nothing to do with post-structuralism, which Carey (though not Lodge) identifies as ‘the Marxist branch’ of structuralism. So Lodge concerns himself only with what he calls ‘classical’ structuralism, and this at any rate is a relief. All the same, Lodge’s claims for that ...”

“... missions to Prague; but before long, for some reason or other (ancestral taint? mal du siècle? post-imperial decadence?), his purpose wavers. Soon Peterley, once more the flâneur and womaniser, is actually wasting the time of Jan Masaryk, whose country is in its death-agonies, by petty jealousies over a girl. There is, he decides despairingly, only one ...”

“... a strict ratio rarely embraced since Hitchcock.If this sounds somewhat fetishistic (the critic Jonathan Romney has described Jenkin as ‘radically artisanal’), he has proven each time that the form serves the content. In Bait he depicts a vanishing fishermen’s world in black and white, with foreboding rather than nostalgia – he makes it look like ...”

“... Bombyx mori, because of how he munched his way steadily through his food and how, waking from a post prandial nap, he burst into life and, ‘flapping his hands, flitted about his library, like a startled moth’. Nothing in this lengthy excursus is unduly far-fetched, though not all of it seems worth the fetching. More engaging is a visit to the village of ...”

“... think that, you might as well think that the setting of a car-bomb is ‘surely [sic], at this “post-political” stage, an art-form’, and Said does. The aestheticising of conflagration, carnage, bombs, gun-fire, has a quaint history which goes back to Nero. It has exercised a certain type of Romantic sensibility from Sade to Mailer, and some bards of ...”

“... thrown up in pursuit of it – that led to the widespread shift of direction signalled by French post-structuralism. It is simplifying matters to treat the prefix ‘post-’ as suggesting any kind of straightforward theoretical advance beyond the structuralist paradigm. At most, it is a label of convenience adopted in the ...”

“... China and – in the phrase of anguished Americans who backed the wrong horse – he lost China. Jonathan Fenby starts his important new biography, the first of substance for a quarter of a century, in Xi’an in 1936 when Chiang, after his 50th birthday, was preparing to bash the Communists. Having ignored the local armed forces’ evident reluctance to ...”