“... that if something is believed in or wanted for long enough, it will eventually materialise. From John Aubrey’s passing remark in 1665 that Stonehenge might have been built by druids, through William Stukeley’s obsessively detailed and almost entirely invented account of the druidic religion it took another hundred and fifty years, but in the early 20th ...”

“... own Hutchinson, Cape, Chatto and Windus, Bodley Head. Below this league, which numbers about ten major players, there have been some marriages of convenience. Weidenfeld holdings, for instance, include the brash Weidenfeld and Nicolson and the staid J.M. Dent and Everyman imprints. There have also been some bloody dismemberings. Methuen (which celebrates its ...”

“... be. ‘Literary work’ in copyright law is thus a semantic convenience of the same order as ‘John Doe’: what it is all depends. The legal fiction that the literary work has an abstract, single existence which accompanies but mysteriously transcends any book fits in nicely with the academic theory of ‘text’. It is no accident that the century which ...”

“... in the last decades of the 18th century, before Wilson came to be forgotten. The portrait painter John Hoppner, an early adherent of the Joey-Barton-on-Question-Time school of cultural criticism, declared that ‘considering the qualities of Claude & Wilson as He shd. the qualities of two fine Women, He should acknowledge the beauties of Claude but say Wilson ...”

“... more than Chernobyl, and a fall in the price of oil which turned the terms of trade in the only major Soviet commodity against him. Much of his difficulty, however, was the result of his own, and his Party’s, failure to grasp that there could be no middle way between Communism and capitalism. Communism may be qualified, as it had been in Hungary since the ...”

“... power whatever) is capable of doing a great deal of harm; and Unger himself acknowledges that any major project of social transformation may well turn out to be massively and brutally unsuccessful in practice. But it certainly does not follow that there is nothing important to be learnt from his urgent and idiosyncratic voice. Like most radical social ...”

“... Insane. His visitor this time is 25-year-old Clarice Starling, an FBI trainee with a double major in psychology and criminology from the University of Virginia. (This, incidentally, is one of Harris’s rare factual mistakes: the University of Virginia doesn’t offer a criminology major.) She has been sent ostensibly ...”

“... of nine-tenths of the stuff that gets written nowadays about Eng. Lit. A fascinating and major paradox is involved; but what would be the point of the author displaying it when a fabulous gathering of fictional puzzles will do it for him? The best critic, like the best novelist, leaves the reader to decide. The paradox remains, however. On the one ...”

“... preface to this celebratory volume of essays presented to Dame Helen Gardner on her 70th birthday, John Carey apologises for the fact that the topics discussed are restricted to 16th and 17th-century English literature. Dame Helen’s latest book, after all, was The Composition of ‘The Four Quartets’. Eliot’s presence, though, still hovers over ...”

“... his own surviving letters. Sterne was hardly the first vain author, but he was perhaps the first major English writer who declined to play the old games of gentlemanly reticence or high-minded modesty. At last, we see an author who does not pretend to be above the market, who unreservedly enjoys popularity. At last, someone who does not regret that all sorts ...”

“... Bill, where he studied English and edited the Daily Bruin (Watergate conspirators Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman were his arch-enemies on the paper). By then, he’d already been part of the Allied occupation of Germany pulling bodies out of the rubble, gone AWOL to attend the Nuremberg Trials (with the intention of assassinating Hermann Göring) and worked ...”

“... gradualism and extrapolation by smooth continuity from causes of change in local populations to major trends and transitions in the history of life. A new and general evolutionary theory will embody this notion of hierarchy and stress a variety of themes either ignored or explicitly rejected by the modern synthesis. These quotations come from a recent ...”

“... to sit on so that at least I could force a smile’), Prescott and his bulimia. Cherie Blair and John Prescott may not have been the most unpopular figures of Blair’s government but they were the two who had the hardest time in the press. Both spent long stretches in the contemporary equivalent of the stocks; a scarring experience, and both of them were ...”

“... was an untapped market for ‘erotic fiction written by women for women’ – Femporn. Since John Cleland, men have written pornography for men under female pseudonyms: a tradition which had been continued by Nexus. But this would be the real thing. The Black Lace imprint was launched in July 1993. It has been a success. Between two and three million ...”

“... and if his grasp of the context is loose, we may be nervous about his judgment on matters of major fact. The chief cause of nervousness appears in his subtitle: ‘Poet and Spy’. We are to imagine that these two aspects of Marlowe’s life are equivalent, or equally established. They are not. Marlowe the poet is a luminous fact; Marlowe the spy is a ...”