“... about what he wrote; this one is principally about what he did.’ Foster has had the benefit of John Kelly’s magnificent, though all too slowly emerging, edition of the correspondence, and has himself done herculean work in the archives. Among his chief sources is of course Yeats’s own ‘disingenuous’ prose masterpiece, the Autobiographies. For this ...”

“... with attention to authors from Homer, Chaucer and Charlotte Yonge to Donald Barthelme and John Barth. A number of the contributors focus on 18th-century fiction, others on 20th-century film, two places where one might most readily expect to find evidence of sequelmania. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s self-fulfilling prophecy in The Terminator, ‘I’ll be ...”

“... of these critics, but the realisation that writers like Conrad and Kipling, or Jane Austen and John Stuart Mill, thought and wrote without the natives in mind as an audience. An Indian or Jamaican woman reading Kim or Jane Eyre was able to bring to light the usually unstated colonial and male-dominated ideological assumptions behind the form of the novel ...”

“... of autobiography, and 900 boxes of letters, speeches and papers to the University of East Anglia. John Peyton, the author of this Life, was Transport Minister from 1970 to 1974. Most of the research work into bombing that I quoted at the beginning is taken from Zuckerman’s autobiography rather than Peyton’s. Neither man makes much sense of the big ...”

“... was a Bible-banging fundamentalist. When officials in Dayton, Tennessee decided to roast John Scopes for teaching evolution in 1925, they called in the ageing Bryan to prosecute. The week-long trial became a national sensation and reached its climax when the defence attorney, Clarence Darrow, called Bryan to the stand and eviscerated his Biblical ...”

“... a national body of verse. When she does mention Scottish anthologists, editors and publishers – John Bell (The Poets of Great Britain), Robert Anderson (Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain) and Thomas Campbell (Specimens of the British Poets) – Bucknell doesn’t comment on the way they promoted through their works’ titles a ...”

“... fictional death was perhaps intended as a protective measure because neither her supposed father, John Pemberton, nor her real father was of much use to her. In the novel Peregrine, on being told of Sophia’s pregnancy, ‘put on a very sad face, then put his face in his hands, but he cheered quite soon and said, “Perhaps it will be born dead.”’Comyns ...”

“... Protestantism that had made too many compromises with the modern world. More than a decade later John Gray, disillusioned with Thatcherism, proposed post-liberalism as a new path; more important, the English Anglican (leaning heavily Anglo-Catholic) John Milbank radicalised the theological project, breaking with liberal ...”

“... ethics and politics, appraising his magisterial synthesis of Aristotelian and Christian thought. John Took asks ‘why Dante matters’ and responds by casting him as an existentialist philosopher. And in a retrospective collection of nineteen essays, Zygmunt Barański addresses the state of Dante studies today, reflecting on everything from his treatment of ...”

“... Ravilious. Friend’s previous books have included splashy illustrated tomes on Ravilious and on John Nash, but here he turns from figurative British artists in love with British tradition towards figurative British artists who wanted to destroy it. An exhibition of AIA work, also called Comrades in Art: Artists against Fascism, is being held at the Towner ...”

“... pretension. Swift’s jailbirds and chimney-sweeps took the place of shepherds and milkmaids; in John Gay’s mock-pastoral The Shepherd’s Week, published a few years after ‘A Description of the Morning’, unpoetic swains and maids sing about turnips, potatoes and the intricacies of cheesemaking. The centrepiece of the second book of Alexander Pope’s ...”

“... penser, but in vain. His next intervention was typically unexpected. In 1972, the English Marxist John Lewis published an article in Marxism Today (which was a response to a lecture by Graham Locke, an English friend of Althusser’s). Althusser’s reply was surprisingly full and detailed, and it is ironical that the Réponse à ...”

“... wrongs. The place was ours, and we went and took it back.’ In The Winter War, Patrick Bishop and John Witherow (who went with the Task Force for the Observer and the Times) conclude: The war had everything in its favour. It was neat and tidy. It had a simple motive and a simple response … No war is to be wished for, but if they have to be fought, this was ...”

“... lack biographies in depth of key religious figure such as Stephen Marshall, Cornelius Burges, John Goodwin, Edmund Calamy, Henry Burton and others. They flit tantalisingly through the pages of Valerie Pearl’s valuable study of the London revolution of 1641, or Anthony Fletcher’s equally important analysis of petitioning on the eve of Civil War. It is ...”

“... In Arthur Schlesinger’s court history, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which might without unfairness be called the founding breviary of the cult of JFK, there appears the following vignette. Schlesinger had been asked to carpenter a ‘White Paper’ justifying Washington’s destabilisation of Cuba, in which the high-flown rhetoric of the New Frontier might form a sort of scab over the fouler business of empire ...”