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“... type of lordly self-belief, nor with the obsessive thirst for fame that motivated a poet like John Berryman. His literary career is often compared pityingly with their astute professionalism, as if, authentic poète maudit though he was, he never quite got the marketing right. Certainly he never managed to create out of his sufferings the suspense of a ...”

“... better things, and for some reason not quite bringing it off in this fine but flawed collection. John Harrison keeps well within his limits in The Ice Monkey, and Other Stories. Written over the period from 1975 to 1982, these seven stories have a sharpness of detail and a sureness of overall control that is wholly admirable. At the same time, Harrison does ...”

“... the high hopes initially entertained were proved vain. The upper classes preferred Mayfair; it took half a century to build and let the houses in Gordon Square; the siting of Euston Station close by did untold damage as heavy traffic invaded the hitherto sequestered streets; and ‘creeping decline’ proved irresistible, as houses were converted into ...”

“... which spoke for this stratum was broadly committed to Butskellite ameliorism, and energetically took part in various official commissions, committees and panels. So much of life became defined as a ‘social problem’ of one sort or another that publishers enjoyed a spell of prosperity, producing a seemingly endless flow of books about the ...”

“... and Robert made up to each other I made fun of it, and that when Myrtle made up tome I solemnly took it all in. You are quite right.’ With a little practice, of course, one comes to respond to this respectful consideration. The cosseted reader starts to enjoy, not only the intimate little details that belong specially to the period – like the ...”

“... Britain without reference to the superb and painful full-length history of it that the late John Vyvyan published in 1969, In Pity and in Anger. (His notes refer, however, to the sequel, though that carries him beyond his chosen period.) It is flabbergasting that he should do so without mentioning that, when the University of Oxford built a vivisection ...”

“... Maconochie, who arrived in Hobart in 1837 as secretary to a new governor, the Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin. Like Macquarie, he soon drew attacks from those who wanted no reforms. Scots tended, it would seem, to be either worse than the common run of English functionaries, or far superior. But between the place of Scotsmen and Irishmen in Australia there ...”

“... professional. In the mid-17th century, the Royal Society established a committee including Dryden, John Evelyn and Edmund Waller, ‘to improve the English tongue’. Nothing much came of this. In 1658, Milton’s nephew Edward Philips had published a New World of English Words which reached its seventh edition by 1720. Swift busied himself with the state of ...”

“... reserves some of his ammunition for the alternative, liberal determinists, Arnold Toynbee, Sir John Plumb, J.H. Hexter, while not forgetting that morally admirable but woefully misled and misleading Christian Socialist R.H. Tawney, who was first denounced in Elton’s inaugural of 1968 as ‘a very good man’ whose work as a historian can never be trusted ...”

“... in Wagner scholarship (or what passes for it) is congenitally resistant to study.’ Thus John Deathridge, the leading Wagner scholar of the English-speaking world, at the beginning of his chapter on Wagner research in the Wagner Handbook. If so learned and au courant a scholar as Deathridge is daunted by trying to make sense of Wagner research and ...”

“... application, always tied, seldom happily, to a university department, and agonising over a book. John Updike, who had a modest two wives and wrote 63 books, was, in a way, worldlier and more comfortable, finding nests at the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books that he never left. These writers are dead now, and the only thing that can be said with ...”

“... Romanian, Bulgarian, Hungarian and Russian peasants. Even among ourselves the Australian poet John Manifold, also an ex-service linguist and ballad collector, would, like Hamish, return to his homeland and there collect and contribute to a tradition (his work was performed and published as Bandicoot Ballads). Our optimism was immense. After all, we ...”

“... ends with the monster fatally stabbing Frankenstein before leaping into the crater of Mount Etna; John Atkinson Kerr’s The Monster and Magician; or, the Fate of Frankenstein (1826) has Frankenstein and the monster grappling in a boat which is struck by a thunderbolt: ‘the waves vomit forth a mass of fire and the Magician and his unhallowed abortion are ...”

“... Muggletonians was, notably, Christopher Hill, who found significant links between these people and John Milton, as they drank and argued in the London pubs of the 1650s. For Hill and Thompson these were ‘radicals’, political as well as religious activists, part of Hill’s World Turned Upside Down. A vertical history of the subject could not at that time ...”

“... Minds have been made up about John Updike. A typical review will begin by grudgingly acknowledging the brilliance of his ‘style’ – as if Updike’s style were a set of dainty curlicues, and not his manner of thought – before complaining about his misogyny, his conservatism, his theological bad faith, the gratuitousness of his language ...”