“... Both of them were careful to spare the susceptibilities of their correspondents back at home. Michael Hurd (The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney) may well be right in contending that Gurney’s madness cannot simply be traced to his experiences in the trenches, horrible though they were. At the Front he seems to have been stoical, cheerful, relaxed, detached: as if ...”

“... at Number 10 was more like a medieval court, a centre of intrigue and morbid suspicion. Marcia Williams, as she then was, had a sharp political intelligence as well as a commanding personality, but some of the others were dreadful toadies. On one occasion, during Wilson’s first year, I told one of my Transport House contacts that perhaps the Prime ...”

“... owing to his lack of assiduity in his attendance beneath the portrait of Queen Anne’ into ‘Michael Howard didn’t think Norman Stone did enough lecturing’? Nearly every page would have profited from half a dozen footnotes. As it is we’re confronted with sentences such as ‘I have since moved to Vespasiennes & to Gwyn ...”

“... in English Poetry’ to the British Society of Aesthetics in 1961, Empson gave William Carlos Williams and his reviewers an exasperated wallop: The most unexpected American critics will be found speaking of him with tender reverence; they feel he is a kind of saint. He has renounced all the pleasures of the English language, so that he is completely ...”

“... he was Jewish. In those days your friends didn’t resign over such a thing. He met Jenifer Williams, the beautiful, outspoken, politically and sexually radical daughter of a diplomat, and amid the tangle of her relations with other men – jealousy being strictly forbidden – they gradually became engaged, and were married in 1941. Before their ...”

“... of One for My Baby is called Alfie (Parsons seems to be paying homage to characters played by Michael Caine). Alfie’s wife is called Rose. Rose dies on him. She was working in Hong Kong. In Man and Boy Harry’s misfortune led him to reassess his relationship with his young son and his parents and to fall in love with a woman who had a young daughter of ...”

“... Investigations, there have been and are many philosophers of a wide range of political shadings (Michael Oakeshott, Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum) who breathe the air of the tower far more easily than they do that of the stove. Maybe if this tendency continues, Montaigne will one day come to seem as ...”

“... then for the stock price of Burroughs Wellcome. On another page the direct quotation of Dan Keith Williams, a group member who embezzled thousands of dollars, serves to shine a light on his equivocation: This is something that Dan Williams did, and if you want to hate me, if you want to think I’m a crook, if you want to ...”

“... come out in English until 2012, but it still isn’t very reader-friendly: it has no introduction (Michael Smith adds a brief translator’s note), sketchy endnotes and no index. It’s basically Lefort’s doctoral thesis, though he was pushing fifty by the time it saw the light of day in French. His thesis supervisor, Raymond Aron, described its style as ...”

“... Keywords’, Jan Zita Grover runs through a lexicon of Aids vocabulary after the manner of Raymond Williams, angrily expounding the ways in which PLWA (people living with Aids) are linguistically punished by the rest of the community. Her approach is determinedly polemical, so that despite what must be an overwhelming sympathy with many aspects of her ...”

“... impulses of their enemies. ‘It’s no fun to protest on an empty stomach,’ said Mayor Michael Bloomberg to assembled journalists, ‘so you might want to try a restaurant. Or you might want to go shopping, maybe for another pair of sneakers for the march.’ New York is a Democrat city, but also a famous backdrop, and the Republicans took the ...”

“... more than mark that wildness’s grave. Being by trade a poet of plain language – William Carlos Williams would be another hero, also George Oppen, also Eileen Myles – Nelson finds her artistic focus drawn in two main directions. On the one hand, she crafts her words until she gets them to ‘facet’ as accurately as she can: ‘How to explain that for ...”

“... through his fiction just as it flowed through the city itself. There’s a strong whiff of Emlyn Williams ham in all this and one reaches for Trollope’s prissy ‘Of Dickens’s style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules ... No young novelist should ever dare to imitate the style of ...”

“... in Biography of Broken Fortunes: Wilky and Bob, Brothers of William, Henry and Alice James (1986); Michael Anesko in ‘Friction with the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (1986); Rayburn Moore in Selected Letters of Henry James to Edmund Gosse (1988); and Lyall Powers in Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters 1900-1915 (1990). There’s ...”

“... Unionism. Unsurprisingly, Unionists had few friends in the newspapers. A bizarre exception was Michael Wharton, a satirical and outrageously reactionary fantasist at the Daily Telegraph, who wrote under the pseudonym Peter Simple. Yet Wharton’s attempts to ridicule the enemies of Unionism were funny precisely because they drew on received assumptions ...”