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“... first dawning sense of the historicity of society so rudely awakened by the French Revolution. David Wittenberg does much better than this, but his remarkable hypothesis is only one of the conceptual breakthroughs in this stimulating contribution to literary theory. I will dwell mainly on the three that interest me the most: the relationship of SF to ...”

“... across the panorama of blight, wheel-hubs for discuses. Trail of the Spider by Anja Kirschner and David Panos announced itself as a Situationist spaghetti western shot on Hackney Marshes; where, the makers assert, the land-grab expansionism of the Old West ‘collides with suppressed history’. Range wars erupt along ‘a vanishing frontier, swarming with ...”

“... associated. The purge of 1519, for instance, which has so engrossed Gwyn’s bête noire David Starkey, was ‘a storm in a tea-cup’. The truth, pronounces Gwyn, is that the political world of Wolsey’s ascendancy was ‘not an environment where faction flourished’. It was nevertheless an environment where the Duke of Buckingham got his head ...”

“... that’s why I keep on singin’ baby My hymns to the silence ... No one who knows the poems of Hugh MacDiarmid will miss the connection, a contemplative mystique of the absolute. However, MacDiarmid also tried to make himself the voice of a nation, and Morrison is nothing like that for Protestant Ulster people. He is just someone who lives in ...”

“... should be ‘exaltation’, although it is hard to be sure. Referring to ‘the historian David Irving’ is like referring to the metallurgist Uri Geller. There were, I think, few ballpoint pens in 1940. On page 160 the idea that the USA passed straight from barbarism to decadence is praised as if it had been conceived by Muggeridge, instead of Oscar ...”

“... accept. ‘If ever defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory, it was the miners’ strike,’ Hugh Scanlon – by then, Lord Scanlon – told Routledge. ‘I think they could have got a settlement with honour. I think when you say, “We’re going to bring the government down”, or you say, “Not one man must be declared redundant”, when you put ...”

“... January, they have been managed by a new Task Force Europe, led by Johnson’s chief negotiator, David Frost, a burly, acerbic diplomat, one of the few in the Foreign Office who has always loathed the EU. Frost’s conversations with Michel Barnier have become openly bitter and recriminatory, in a way not seen before. Frost is backed up by contemptuous ...”

“... an 1827 cartoon by Michael Egerton (her selection of London fog illustrators, from Cruikshank to David Langdon, adds entertainment and insight all through the book.)Corton salutes Dickens’s mastery of ‘the use of fog as extended metaphor’. And of course no fog in literature approaches that introduction to Bleak House with ‘Fog everywhere. Fog up the ...”

“... scholar. There were flirtations with academia, including an episode acting as stalking horse for Hugh Trevor-Roper in his pursuit of the regius professorship. Overall his relationship to the academy was yet another of those ambivalent connections that characterised him. Much as he affected to dislike the idea of a university post he was more than once ...”

“... translation. Jeffrey Bernstein has the wordier ‘Which of these two ways is without evil?’ David Mulroy, the punchier ‘Can either choice be right?’ Agamemnon is in a position where there is no right answer, no guiltless way to act.The terrible moment is figured as in part a choice, in part an act of compulsion: Agamemnon ‘placed his neck beneath ...”

“... such works as James Audubon’s Birds of America, George Henry Lewes’s Sea-Side Studies, Hugh Miller’s The Old Red Sandstone and innumerable commercial contemplations of flowers, shells and natural novelties. Alternately artistic and sentimental in impulse, the tradition of nature-appreciation inspired works that were genuinely meditative as well ...”

“... were preventing the private sector taking on public land to build badly needed new homes. In 2010 David Cameron commissioned Philip Green to conduct an ‘efficiency review’ for the new coalition government, and he duly reported that the state, ‘the largest tenant/owner in the country’, was ‘wholly inefficient’ when it came to the use and management ...”

“... man’, and derided Spender and Auden as lightweights when compared with ‘the redoubtable Hugh MacDiarmid’. He interrupted establishment speakers, organised demonstrations, wrote ‘Songs of Sabotage and Sedition’ and, when the war started, campaigned against its extension into a global conflict that could be settled only by the total defeat of ...”

“... He didn’t have much use for the work of his contemporaries and juniors (his fellow Celts David Jones and Hugh MacDiarmid were partial exceptions), but was on the whole pleasant about it. A breezy manner (‘Unabashed boys and girls may enjoy them. This book is theirs’), a few eclectic names ...”

“... In January 1999, Colin Middleton hanged himself in prison. He’d been in custody since 1982, when he was convicted – aged 14 – of murdering his 18-month-old niece. While in prison, he had harmed himself seriously, written to the governor about his mental illness, and spoken about suicide to other inmates. On the day before his death he didn’t leave his cell, even for meals, and placed a rug over the inspection port ...”