“... back pages are going to be well-thumbed. ‘Hi, Craig,’ see page 752, you ‘mad sod’; ‘Hi, John,’ see page 563, you ‘arse-faced trendy’; ‘Hi, David,’ see page 266, you ‘deaf cunt’, and so on. Less succinct salutations will be discovered by the likes of Donald Davie (‘droning out his tosh’), Ted Hughes (‘boring old monolith, no good ...”

“... This went badly awry. ‘If a noble family cannot rebuild their own castle,’ thundered John Ruskin, ‘in God’s name let them live in the nearest ditch till they can.’ The popular view that stately homes were part of the national heritage was now challenged by the Radical view that they were the national heritage, wrongly appropriated. With an ...”

“... situation now is very different. At the age of 78, and with the possible exception of John Adams, Glass can be regarded as the most famous – certainly the most successful – of all the composers who emerged from the minimalist revolution of the 1960s. Perhaps because he shed the technical apparatus of such iconic pieces as Reich’s Drumming ...”

“... Beneath their plain and practical exteriors, Secord suggests, the new scientific bestsellers took on some of the roles of fiction and advice literature, creating a new class of self-fashioning consumers and orienting them in a rapidly changing world. Just as the Reform Act was regarded by some campaigners as a historic victory and by others as a shameful ...”

“... debris. T.C. Boyle is part East Coast acerbic, part Californian flower-guru. In youth, he took the Burroughs-tour from a childhood in the ‘vestigial woods of suburban Westchester’, through fixations on Huxley, Orwell, Salinger and Kerouac, into drop-out drug addiction and subsequently dragged himself out of smack-bohemia, settling into a PhD in ...”

“... and Christian orthodoxies informed early modern attitudes, so that the devoutly Protestant John Locke could assert on both counts that ‘labour for labour’s sake is against nature.’ There would be no work in heaven. But then in the second half of his chapter, on ‘the rewards of labour’, Thomas inverts this picture, tracing ‘the rudiments of ...”

“... When​ the 22-year-old Charles Darwin joined HMS Beagle in 1831 he took a copy of Paradise Lost with him, and over the next five years he read it many times, in Brazil, Patagonia, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia and Mauritius. As the ship’s naturalist he sent commentaries and specimens back to colleagues in London, who soon came to see him not as a dilettante but an extremely acute observer ...”

“... digression, exposition, all done with stylish dispatch, admirably rendered by the translator, John Howe. Closer to a looped sequence of essays than a memoir, the book nonetheless shows off the memoirist’s skill to stunning effect in three somewhat unflattering portraits – Castro, Guevara and Mitterrand – and reminds us that distance and disloyalty ...”

“... merely reverse them. Stress on the whole Tudor Myth, concern with the source materials Shakespeare took from contemporary historians, whether primarily ‘for’ the Prince or ‘for’ Falstaff, prejudges the actual form and substance of these plays.Scholarly criticism of the Henry IV plays is haunted by an interesting problem of structure. There is marked ...”

“... so, off and on, he raced round the coalfields of those two counties (and of Lancashire, where he took a new job for the miners in 1845), arguing, injuncting, adjourning for accused miners and their families. ‘We resisted,’ he explained, ‘every act of repression, even those we were sure of losing.’ He lost most of them. But he won some. In the early ...”

“... carried on, with his awful quasi-American evangelical rallies, as though people couldn’t think. John Hewson, whose like I trust we shall never see again in this arena, was brought up a Baptist – he’s still got that pious look – and studied postgraduate economics in the USA. Later he left the wife who’d typed his thesis and raised the kids, telling ...”

“... a dust-sheet over her first husband. Miss Edwards excellently takes it off. The second husband, John Marsh, was an advertising copywriter and a PR man. He read her epic carefully and, among many other things, took out the dashes. Gone with the Wind was written in a peculiar manner. It is, of course, very long, but epics ...”

“... were, in art and life, part of Capa’s style. Whelan demythologises Capa without being sour. John Hersey wrote that ‘despite all his inventions and postures Capa has somewhere at his centre a reality. This is his talent’ – and described that talent as you might an actor’s or a gambler’s. Perhaps the wars he covered encouraged that kind of ...”

“... as ‘a symbol of American cultural imperialism’. In December 1982, the West German Government took the unprecedented step of issuing a communiqué to the effect that Dallas did not pose a fundamental threat to the German family. Opposition MPs were not satisfied. With its complete egoism, commercialism and debasement of human relationships, the series had ...”

“... to that honour, consequence and independence, which European laws studied to uphold.’ In 1848, John Mitchell Kemble, in one of the top three, assured (reassured?) Queen Victoria that ‘woman among the Teutons was near akin to divinity, but not one among them ever raved that the femme libre could be woman.’ On the other hand, some scholars (few of whom ...”