“... one that Beckett has turned to advantage more fully than almost any other writer since Milton. Andrew Kennedy’s paper expounds the view of Beckett’s corpus as an agonisingly prolonged endgame, the manifestation of an unremitting principle of ‘self-diminishment’ coupled with a ‘controlled inward regression’. Each successive product of the ...”

“... write novels,’ he wrote (again, though, not to Amis), novels that would be ‘a mix of Lawrence, Thomas Hardy and George Eliot’. In order to achieve this aim, he is already shaping up to distance himself from enfeebling human attachments: ‘I find that once I “give in” to another person ... there is a slackening and dulling of the peculiar artistic ...”

“... showed some years ago, Shakespeare had links with a brewer of that name during his sojourn near St Andrew by the Wardrobe. Doubtless the Oxford editors felt that a single unfamiliar poem was as much as the public would swallow at once, but sagacious readers will instantly agree that the proximity of another plausibly Shakespearean poem surviving only from ...”

“... but this does not justify giving him a position more crucial than that occupied, for example, by Thomas Hobbes. Among the inclusions and exclusions in this volume, there is no particularly clear principle, but some are more questionable than others. One of the more surprising inclusions is Andrew Marvell. To classify him ...”

“... To be sold by Private Contract, the Right of the Next Presentation to the Vicarage of St Andrew, in the borough of Plymouth, in the County of Devon … upon the avoidance thereof of the present incumbent, who is nearly eighty years of age.’Navy jobs were given out by ships’ captains, who took on boys in the first instance as personal servants and ...”

“... and drowsy hammocks’, and Youth (which contained Heart of Darkness), reviewed by William Beach Thomas, who had robustly little time for Conrad’s dense pessimism. Two years later, on Chekhov’s death, Francis Gribble magniloquently wavered on the fine point of the Russian’s stature: ‘he may or may not have been a man of genius.’ Too ...”

“... confirms that the neo-Victorian low-life, high-filth novel is doing well. To add to the buzz, Andrew Davies’s three-part adaptation of Waters’s first novel, Tipping the Velvet, has just been shown on TV. Waters’s tale of lesbian prostitution in the 1890s attracted publicity chiefly for the casting of Diana Rigg’s daughter, leather dildos and the ...”

“... Anson’s circumnavigation of the world, a significant new biography of Captain Cook by Nicholas Thomas, and many other substantial works. John Sugden and Andrew Lambert have just produced biographies of Horatio Nelson, and a further biography by R.J.B. Knight is eagerly awaited. The Royal Navy is doing very well, thank ...”

“... a migration to other continents, and exponential growth globally. The second volume opens with Thomas Pavel’s thoughtful and informative ‘historical morphology’ of the novel, from Heliodorus to Kafka, which describes a ‘confluence’ of different sub-genres (chivalric romance, elegy, pastoral, picaresque, novella) in 18th-century Britain (and to a ...”

“... order’. Gildea’s title gives us one of his own keywords: ‘backbone’. The Scottish miner Thomas Watson, when interviewed by Gildea, recalled his father often saying that ‘the miners are the backbone of the nation.’ Coal was central to the industrial economy, powering homes, factories, land and sea transport, steel production and electricity ...”

“... next ten years firefighting the publication of pirated editions. (The poem mocks, among others, Thomas Moore, who became his friend, and the critic Francis Jeffrey, who became his champion.) He came back to London with two manuscripts in his luggage: Hints from Horace, a gentler sequel to English Bards, in which he leavens the satire with some literary ...”

“... Similarly, it is hard not to detect the verdict of moral absurdity in his account of R.S. Thomas as ‘primarily a religious poet, tormented by a sense of God’s absence, and berating his parishioners for using refrigerators, washing machines, and other modern evils’, or of air-headedness in his remark that Mrs Yeats’s ability to hear spirit ...”

“... pioneer of modernism culminated in the publication in 1952 of a biography by the English architect Thomas Howarth, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Modern Movement. But to interpret his work in this light required a certain manipulation of the evidence. Shand, and others, deplored the feminine, decorative influence of Margaret’s ‘rather thin Aubrey ...”

“... children’.In 2010, the disgraced (but still popular on the paid-lecture circuit) anti-vaxxer Andrew Wakefield visited the Somali community in Minnesota to expound his claims that the MMR vaccine causes autism in children. In the following years, vaccination rates in this group fell from more than 90 per cent to around 50 per cent. Researchers found that ...”

“... The Founding Fathers of the United States were mainly Southerners: between them, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison can take credit for drafting the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, winning the Revolutionary War, and preserving America’s independence through its turbulent early decades ...”