“... v. Master of Fine Arts) and their perceived objects of study (‘literature’ v. ‘fiction’). Mark McGurl’s The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, a study of Planet MFA conducted from Planet PhD, might not strike the casual reader as an interdisciplinary bombshell, but the fact is that literary historians don’t write ...”

“... father as he grows older, in the process getting to look less like Raymond Huntley and more like Francis L. Sullivan and ‘the sort of person that democracy doesn’t suit’.Larkin’s choice of profession is unsurprising because from an early age libraries had been irresistible. ‘I was an especially irritating kind of borrower, who brought back in the ...”

“... points are not taken very far (except, in snatches, in an interesting if idiosyncratic essay by Francis Sparshott). Many contributors simply appeal to the importance of ‘originality’ in art, as if this solved rather than re-labelled the problem. A serious and long-standing omission from the whole debate is an examination of what the notion of forgery is ...”

“... of his pack’, organising ballgames and Fourth of July pageants. A mediocre student, he made his mark in baseball and managed to gain admission to Harvard, along with a sprinkling of other Catholics. Making his way on personal magnetism, ‘he could charm a bird out of a tree’, a friend recalled. For years he had been attracted to Rose ...”

“... ownership led to a wartime golden age of radio propaganda. The Nazis were quickest off the mark, but other governments soon followed their example; in 1941, Britain’s ‘black radio’ network, under Sefton Delmer, began to broadcast anti-Nazi, anti-war messages in German. That these operations often enjoyed only limited success did nothing to ...”

“... when he did appear in Julius Caesar, Forrest played the less intellectual and more show-stopping Mark Antony, but he much preferred those Shakespearean roles which allowed him physically to dominate the stage for a large proportion of the play and then to finish on a spectacular death: roles like Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and, above ...”

“... Surrender of Breda, off to the left, his green jacket and trousers an irresistible punctuation mark in the painting’s wall of browns. And I cannot take stock of the rifleman – his look out of the illusion, his exchange of some kind of awareness with us, his distraction from the scene of chivalry – without Brecht’s ‘Fragen eines lesenden ...”

“... dealt with figures in extreme and exquisite isolation, as in the novels of Beckett and Francis Stuart, or offered elaborate comedy, as in Flann O’Brien. In Irish fiction after Joyce, the women suffered and the men were anti-social, and the tone is one of unnerving bleakness. The problem for Moore, McGahern, Higgins and many others was how to ...”

“... be your fa!) An’ gied the infant warld a shog,    ‘Maist ruin’d a’. It is a mark of Burns’s genius that he makes what he does of the expression ‘lang syne’ – past times, long ago. He has the ability to make poverty erotic and to make the Fall of Man seem like something recollected at a Silver Wedding. The poem ‘Auld Lang ...”

“... pause, and the tone and air with which he answered, “It is a haggard existence!”’ Mark Storey, Southey’s most recent biographer, gently describes him as ‘less than completely stable’, and his poetry is a product of his genius for repression, as the handsome and welcome new edition of the verse lets us see with new clarity. No one in the ...”

“... discovery of hydrogen; ‘The way to talk to Cavendish is never to look at him,’ the astronomer Francis Wollaston was to say of him. Both books also rightly flay the writings of Bruno Bettelheim, the mid-century psychoanalytic huckster (he called himself ‘doctor’ but had neither a medical degree nor any training in clinical psychology) who got famous by ...”

“... beliefs about the legitimacy of certain forms of profit or income – beliefs that have left their mark on the language. At a time when income from ownership of land underwrote the social order, a stigma attached to ‘rack-renting’, defined as ‘to raise rent above a fair or normal amount’. In times of war or other emergencies, the ‘profiteer’ is ...”

“... to extend the promise of redemption to people of colour, seeing in them the curse of Ham and mark of Cain. Wheatley reminds them: ‘Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,/May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.’ Rhyming Cain’s sin with the angel’s glory, Wheatley promises an alchemical transformation of those who are elevated by ...”

“... up with. Everyone was connected, one way or another. Three of Albertina’s brothers – Jimmy, Francis and John – joined the occupation, along with their uncle, Eddie. ‘It was like no other department in Cammell Laird’s,’ Albertina says. ‘Because it was all younger lads. And it was full of comedians. It was a joy to go into work. You’d rather ...”

“... mid-Sixties I wrote a BBC TV series, Life in NW1, based on one such family, the Stringalongs, whom Mark Boxer then took over to people a cartoon strip in the Listener, and who kept cropping up in his drawings for the rest of his life. What made the social set-up funny was the disparity between the style in which the new arrivals found themselves able to live ...”