“... and ‘Evidence in the Eliot Case’ (1996) – this last featuring a notably unkind commentary on Christopher Ricks’s editing of Eliot’s Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-17. In the new book, as in these essays, Raine assumes that his readers are likely to be ‘somewhat impure and apt to confuse issues’. It is my impression that he remained ...”

“... The implication, perhaps, is that the 1980s were judged by the two editors, Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks, to be likely to rate correctness of language above its political and social implications, while the 1990s will reverse these priorities. There is little point in taking issue with this, since in practice such divisions don’t hold fast: most ...”

“... feasts,/Haunting the granaries of words like breasts’, ‘Who would have thought it? At the White Gates/She let them do whatever they liked’), or the customary brew of voyeurism and Catholicism:The white towelling bathrobeungirdled, the hair still wet,first coldness of the underbreastlike a ciborium in the ...”

“... name of morality.It would be a pity if this were attributed to a single ill-judged remark, which Christopher Hilliard describes in A Matter of Obscenity as ‘the most famous self-inflicted wound in English legal history’. There is plenty of competition for that distinction, starting with Oscar Wilde’s ‘Oh dear, no, he was a particularly plain ...”

“... its old blanket denial and replacing it with a strategy of ‘information management’, as Christopher Moran termed it in his recent book, Classified: Secrecy and the State in Modern Britain.* Historians thought sympathetic to the intelligence services were granted privileged access to closed papers in order to produce official histories. One of them ...”

“... far likelier to comply.’ This is almost exactly the scenario laid out by the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas in his 1995 article ‘The Structure of Evil’ when he describes the ‘psychic death’ or ‘radical infantilisation’ that the serial killer imposes on his victim: ‘With the total collapse of trust and the madness expressed by sudden ...”

“... man. What we know of his frustrations, fantasies and fears we know from his stories. Dracula, Christopher Frayling writes in his preface to the Penguin edition, ‘was probably transgressing something – but the critics weren’t quite sure exactly what’. The author probably wasn’t sure either. All Stoker seems to have wanted to do was to write a ...”

“... surname, because his father has literally torn his page out of the family history. In The Woman in White (1859-60) – recently reprinted by Vintage without any notes or even Collins’s own prefaces – the uncanny resemblance of two women makes them vulnerable to identity theft, incarceration in a lunatic asylum, and poisoning. The heroine of No Name ...”

“... final words, while Juliet is conceived by Simone Rocha as she’s always conceived: in virginal white, waiting in her borrow’d likeness of shrunk death. Christopher Kane’s Lady Macbeth crouches in an evening gown, her hands full of red petals, looking more like Shelley’s beloved heaping rose leaves on the bed. If ...”

“... Christopher Lasch, who died last year, has been rather undernoticed in Britain. His attention was admittedly focused on American politics and political thinking, but his fears and anxieties translate readily enough to a Britain showing many of the same symptoms of social and political disaffection, while his politics and his polemical style were those of an urbanised Cobbett – radical, popular, egalitarian and quite unplaceable on a left-right spectrum ...”

“... body of colour. Another black innovator stepping up to ‘support’ another bunch of blithe white minstrels. Many inside Prince’s camp saw the Stones gig as a turning point. Already known as something of a control freak, Prince would make sure he was never put in a similar position again – not onstage, not in the media, not in a recording ...”

“... the internet into literature: ‘All writing about the portal so far had a strong whiff of old white intellectuals being weird about the blues.’ Explaining a meme confines it to a dusty museum. We peer at it through smeared bifocals. This does not dissuade her. Something is being experienced for the first time. Somebody needs to record that feeling. In ...”

“... it in his diary: I saw Cyril Connolly talking to an elderly, refined-looking man wearing a white Stetson hat and white bandana tied about his neck, and, excited, I went to Connolly to tell him some gossip that I had had from Stephen which I assumed would impress him for my being close enough to Stephen that he would ...”

“... story in which a sorcerer traps Don Quixote in a chariot that’s drawn by two flying horses, one white, one black. ‘He knew it was a cage, not a chariot,’ David says, ‘but he allowed the sorcerer to lock him up anyway.’ Cervantes, Plato, the Incarnation: there are too many keys on offer to choose any one with confidence, and the same goes for the ...”

“... way. The previous year, Black Panther, which Lee had next to nothing to do with, was briefly the white-hot centre of popular culture. What Wertham would have made of it is anyone’s ...”