“... the one that simply does not appear in the DES’s ‘research’, begins at 27, when the bright young scholar with a PhD under his belt decides, after the tenth or fifteenth rejection for one of the few vacancies that there are, to pack his bags for Berkeley or Austin, Texas or Geneva. And that is the last you have seen of him. Or her. Instead, the ...”

“... de Man toady’, but how reassuring to hear that they were really ignorant sycophants. If a young woman with degrees from Yale and Oxford has written a feminist critique of the beauty industry which becomes a best-seller, and she’s pretty to boot, how comforting to hear that she’s ‘a parent-pleasing, teacher-pleasing little kiss-ass’. If a ...”

“... of men congratulating one another. Deven meets two wives of the poet Nur. One of them is quite young in spirit: she is regarded as a low-class girl whom the great poet picked up once; she counters this by making her birthday a festival, dressing up and reciting her own verse – but Deven and the other men do not want to hear her. Deven cannot get his ...”

“... is instructive to compare it with that masterpiece of invention, Larkin’s poem on looking at a young girl’s photograph album.’ The comparison isn’t made, so the instruction is hypothetical, but Bayley’s general patience is clarified by what it has to put up with in Ashbery’s Shadow Train. Bayley has defended his criteria in several other ...”

“... and inequality were imposed by law in many American states. Nowadays it is far more common to find young white Americans amazed at the frequency with which crudely racist remarks are made by white British people. This is one example among many in the book where information, true in itself but incomplete, is adduced to develop a false argument. Another ...”

“... multiple cuts, as indeed are other subjects. The deepest cut is the freezing of posts: it keeps young scholars out of academic life, thus inducing an atmosphere of stagnation, and it results in morale-destroying lacunae at the senior level. Consequently, there are now departments with no very junior people and no professors. The government may have set out ...”

“... inside and outside Madison Square Garden, eclipsing Paul Robeson and Dean Acheson. An awestruck young Alistair Cooke reported in the Guardian that ‘he looks like a divinity and he looks like the portrait on every dollar bill.’ The resemblance to George Washington is undeniable, although there is a creepy hint of Alastair Sim too. Never one to ...”

“... Queen Incog’ in this rough and tumble burlesque, and according to her first biographer David Baker, who wrote eight years after her death in 1756, she ‘appears to have had a relation of close literary intimacy’ with the feckless Hatchett. But that’s as warm as the paternity trail ever gets. It doesn’t help, as Baker also recorded, that ...”

“... Larkin’s closeted artiness to Amis’s knockabout style. Sometimes, as when he writes of the young Amis being viewed as ‘almost charismatic’, apparent bitchiness turns out to be a side effect of an awkward way with words. Elsewhere he seems as appalled as any taste-shaping puritan by Amis’s boozing and shagging. And after a while it’s hard not to ...”

“... William Hunter and illustrated with copperplate engravings. In 1751, Hunter acquired the body of a young girl who died suddenly in the ninth month of pregnancy. (Most of the corpses available for dissection purposes belonged to criminals, and since pregnant women weren’t hanged it was rare to gain access to their dead bodies.) The woman’s legs have been ...”

“... that’s no bad thing: her blend of crackling violence and surreal wit often seems closer to David Lynch than Aquinas.The theological approach receives a predictably complete expression in Christine Flanagan’s edition of The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon. The two women were introduced by Robert Lowell, who had met O’Connor at ...”

“... being British’. Hosking knew that they already had a reputation for being ‘unusually intrepid young women’ in this huge country with its ‘very small white population’. Hosking felt that the white European men in Africa admired the women’s ‘spirit’ and their working so far from home and always seemed ‘delighted’ to be asked to drive them ...”

“... energy, old prophecies fulfilled: its millenarian ideology included plenty that appealed to young men of a certain type. Sweeping across Upper Mesopotamia, its fighters summoned up memories in the European mind of Timur and the Golden Horde. But these weren’t primitive rebels. They came – echoing American claims in Iraq – as builders of a ...”

“... in philosophical method was logical positivism, channelled into Language, Truth and Logic by a young A.J. Ayer. Ayer proclaimed the verification principle: that only statements open to empirical verification can be meaningful. It didn’t take long for critics to notice that the verification principle cannot be empirically verified. Likewise, Machery may ...”

“... Barry Hannah, Diane Williams and Mary Robison.One of the best accounts of Lish’s influence is in David Leavitt’s roman à clef Martin Bauman; Or, a Sure Thing. He appears in the first paragraph of the first chapter disguised as Stanley Flint, a creative writing teacher and human resources nightmare:Wild rumours circulated about this seminar. It was said ...”