“... any definition.’ Newton is enlisted into the gay fraternity, partly on the fictional evidence of John Barth’s Sot Weed Factor; Gray is ‘clearly homosexual’; Akenside is ‘exclusively homosexual’; and Handel is declared ‘more homosocial than the norm for the age’. As Rousseau extends his list to include Burke, Smollett, Cleland and Horace ...”

“... seas; the Clashing Rocks crush rash explorers. Natural conservatism and the passion for authority foster an acceptance of tradition, however grotesque. Ultimately non-tenable theories, above all that of the geocentric universe, attract too great a weight of psychological and religious investment to be abandoned with impunity. But, as Galileo may or may not ...”

“... at home and for military defeat abroad. In his compelling biographical and historical study of John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, Neil Sheehan focuses our attention on this sorry chapter in American foreign affairs. A prize-winning reporter in Saigon for United Press International and the New York Times, Sheehan also won distinction as the journalist ...”

“... Then we found out what the modernists were rebelling against.’ Eugenides studied at Brown with John Hawkes and at Stanford with Gilbert Sorrentino, exacting experimentalists who were ‘against order on the whole and against storytelling’. By setting much of his new novel at Brown in the early 1980s, Eugenides returns to the time of the fall; by ...”

“... as well as a blood relative of the former royal house. The 12th-century Byzantine poet and scholar John Tzetzes made the reasonable claim that, as a young man, and long before Magas’ breakaway, Callimachus had an entrée to the Ptolemaic court. Prior to this, however, we hear of him teaching at a school in an Alexandrian suburb, and complaining of ...”

“... customers actually mistook them for women, an illusion that the whore himself could foster by a deft substitution of orifices. Prostitutes rarely undressed, permitting penetration through strategic slits in their knickers. Dragged-up male sex workers could thus be set on by outraged female streetwalkers as well as by common or garden ...”

“... the younger ones get a better deal.’ But it seems that the children may have to be brought up in foster homes, and perhaps theirs isn’t the most enviable situation. One of the women describes her son’s reactions of severe shock on discovering what his mother’s job was when he was 13. Rewards: quite apart from money, from the tangle of things that make ...”

“... is he/she overrated? – they would quickly decline into paranoia. When Robert Frost died, John Berryman’s first response was It’s scary. Who’s Number One? Who’s Number One? Cal’s Number One, isn’t he? – which at least has the virtue of transparency. But as we modestly (and necessarily) insist that we’re just writers at work on our ...”

“... demographic, criminal, medical – gathered for large populations. Eighteenth-century writers like John Arbuthnot and Johann Süssmilch had chalked up the remarkable stability of the ratio of girl-to-boy babies born each year to divine providence, but to the judicial statisticians of the early 19th century it seemed less clear what interest God might have in ...”

“... of Moscow and the dominion of the world. Americans are readily alarmed, sometimes even panicked. John Foster Dulles, who worked for Truman and then became Secretary of State to Eisenhower, with a single-mindedness matching Mao’s lashed together a ring-fence around China, designed to contain the eastern end of the presumed Sino-Soviet monolith as Nato ...”

“... however, Young thought that the Early Victorian period had fallen into contempt, and by 1917 John Morley’s Recollections confessed that ‘critics today are wont to speak contemptuously of the mid-Victorian age.’ Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians was published in May the following year – a revenge, at least in part, on the Victorian values ...”

“... only increased the call for Tin Pan Alley ante-bellum nostalgia, a staple product since Stephen Foster’s day. Waller would wage uncivil war on any cotton corn that came his way.Ante-bellum Waller is daring for its day, and still very funny because the objects of his parody are known to us still: Gone with the Wind, of course; the movie Jezebel (1938); and ...”

“... it had been destroyed.As it turned out, however, there was much more to come. In the late 1970s, John Marks, a journalist who specialised in intelligence matters, filed a Freedom of Information request that uncovered a trove of 16,000 documents, most of which hadn’t been sent for shredding because they were filed as financial records. In the course of ...”

“... him in the 1750s. So too, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, agnostic clerics such as John Robinson, the author of Honest to God, David Jenkins, the controversial bishop of Durham, the Scots Episcopalian bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, and the Anglican atheist Don Cupitt belong more convincingly in liberal ranks than with authentic enemies ...”

“... and sentiment’. The shape of that sentiment became increasingly clear. In a eulogy for David Foster Wallace, who killed himself in 2008, Saunders explained his friend’s accomplishment in terms that made it hard not to imagine he was also describing his own aspirations: ‘Something about the prose itself was inducing a special variety of openness that ...”