“... Young Man Luther and Gandhi’s Truth – came out in 1958 and 1969; the first inspired John Osborne’s play, the latter won several prizes. In both he focused on turning-points (or identity crises) in the lives of the great men to whom he felt drawn. Luther is rather more tied down to the psychoanalytical than Gandhi: the amorphousness of Indian ...”

“... and tells me ideally she would vote for a bizarre dream-ticket of Bradley and Republican senator John McCain, who both advocate it. But most are straightforwardly undecided between Bradley and the other Democratic contender and favourite, Al Gore. Bradley arrives, six and a half feet tall and ramrod straight. He walks round the room, shaking hands and saying ...”

“... dumb activities in this dumb working-class school about the dumbest was shop: Elvis Presley’s major.’ Nor does Goldman intend that Elvis’s friends should do him credit. Here is a verbal snapshot of ‘lifelong friend and companion, Red West. Red is a senior at the time, a tough, aggressive, football-playing poor boy, whose ribs are visibly deformed ...”

“... became all but invisible. Fortunately, in 1962, a new campaign of restoration was undertaken by John Brealey, under the supervision of Anthony Blunt. The results were remarkable. Although the pictures now displayed in the Orangery at Hampton Court are obviously little more than shadows of their former selves, and one could not be restored at all, enough has ...”

“... the Nazis and the world of business was almost total. The really big businessmen, the heads of the major German corporations, moved in high circles – from which, as Henry Ashby Turner showed in his excellent study,* they looked down on the Nazis with shuddering distaste and mounting alarm. For their part, Hitler’s economic advisers regarded the world of ...”

“... happens to contain a spelling mistake of his own: the fact that one of his American Modernists is John Ashbery, whose name Stead cannot spell, gives one little confidence in the quality of the information underlying these Modernist choices. Stead is a vigorous writer, and there are pages in this book that are stronger than my review suggests. But it is ...”

“... Septimus Smith and Clarissa Dalloway as the centres of intensity in the book’s life, the ‘major characters’, and are led to expect connection between them at the level of event. Instead, their contacts are oblique and communal: like other inhabitants of the city, they observe the closed car, the commercial aeroplane. They share no personal ...”

“... However, it wasn’t until Dryden’s translation of 1697 that the Aeneid became naturalised as a major English poem. Like Gavin Douglas, Dryden writes out of pride in his nation and his native language, and he aims to create a consolidating, monumental work. In a long, dedicatory preface he states that his expressed confidence in his own translation may ...”

“... know where the face or the value of the collection lay; the only thing that was clear was that a major poet had arrived and the Romantic era was over. The title page of the volume carried a dedication in French and English and an epigraph in Italian: ‘For Jean Verdenal, 1889–1915, mort aux Dardanelles’, followed by those lines of Statius to ...”

“... for making the European Human Rights Convention directly enforceable in British courts – a major constitutional change which would mean more rather than fewer applications for judicial review. And he warned liberally-minded judges, like Lord Woolf and Justices Laws and Sedley, against ‘judicial supremacism’ following articles in which they seemed ...”

“... of Nations.’ Disillusionment with Versailles, and the revulsion against nationalism, were the major reasons for the decline in Mazzini’s reputation, particularly in the English-speaking world. It cannot be denied that the idea of the ‘national mission’ lends itself to dangerous uses, and that Mazzini did not resist the temptation to assign Italy a ...”

“... journalism, universality is mocked. White complains that minor gay art is called ‘gay’ while major gay art is called ‘classic’ or ‘canonical’. There is muttering against ‘the bourgeois recuperation of all dissident literatures (and of gay literature in particular) through an appeal to universalism ... At this point it might be worth mentioning ...”

“... almost to zero. There has never been a really successful modern recasting of Beowulf apart from John Gardner’s anarchic Grendel of 1971. (Michael Crichton’s disastrous and vainly Scandinavianising Eaters of the Dead has just been hauled back into print on the back of Jurassic Park.) The only Anglo-Saxon novels of any weight are about defeat and the end ...”

“... to understand what experis in other fields are saying. A few weeks earlier, the editor of Nature, John Maddox, reported on a conference about scientific journals and electronic publishing. Now that electronic mail (email) allows instant publication, printed journals carry a time penalty. Moreover, as email contributions and commentary appear side by side they ...”

“... Continuum’ savages every ‘Golden Age’ cliché it can find right down to the classic line: ‘John, we’ve forgotten our food pills.’ Try that in the high-fibre age! The list of mid-Eighties new authors is incomparably stronger than that of the mid-Seventies: Benford, Gibson, Crowley, Powers, Shea, Brin, Wolfe, Morrow, Elgin, as opposed to what then ...”