“... William Heinemann, who eventually published it, initially objected that Victoria, dome-shaped in black with a white feathered bonnet, looked like a tea cosy. By 1897 the ‘Good Queen and Empress’, a fixture in the mind’s eye of three generations, did look like a tea cosy and was as reassuringly familiar. The print struck the balance between respect and ...”

“... from New Orleans, and only ten miles from the Mexican border. It has a large Latin population, a black ghetto, a corrupt mayor (whose first name was Mayor until he dropped it by deed poll), and an underworld dominated by the shadowy figure of the Dude, who works exclusively through Silent Partners and his answering service. It also has a visiting ...”

“... of projection. An excellent new study of these issues, and of Quine’s philosophy in general, is Christopher Hootway’s Quine. Quine and Realism That Quine’s perspectivalism about meaning flows from his positivist picture of knowledge and language does not mean that his arguments can safely be ignored by philosophers of a more realist ...”

“... Widmerpool observing with approval: ‘Why, mother, you are wearing your bridge coat.’ Black humour is a misnomer and indeed a contradiction, because like all technical kinds of joking it is operationally-determined and programmed for a predictable effect in a given context. It assumes a unitary world, a kind of dark equivalent of ...”

“... forms of criticism. Among the most deep and distinguished of this last kind of interpreter is Christopher Ricks, whose previous books include Milton’s Grand Style, Keats and Embarrassment, T.S. Eliot and Prejudice and Beckett’s Dying Words. Dylan’s Visions of Sin is the culmination of at least three decades’ critical engagement with the songs of ...”

“... and despite the solemn treatment of his terrors and coming of age, there’s more than a touch of black farce in the novel’s stage management, especially during the final catastrophe. Above all, the translated Yiddish dialogue is splendid: ‘almost too splendid’, according to Alfred Kazin, who wrote the introduction to a 1991 edition of the novel, since ...”

“... him. Described by one 16th-century Spanish ambassador as blunt, uncourtly and dressed always in black, Walsingham has long defied categorisation. John Cooper’s book is a fresh attempt to assess the accuracy of these opposing images. It charts Walsingham’s life from his birth in 1531 or 1532, on the cusp of the Henrician Reformation and the break with ...”

“... the reflection? In a new study of English popular religion based on ecclesiastical court records, Christopher Haigh finds that Dent’s four characters represent widely held attitudes. While Dent invented them as useful stereotypes, his book succeeded because people recognised them and the things he had them say. Court records and books like Dent’s can be ...”

“... in several editions with large print runs, but as usual demand exceeded supply, and the book’s black market value was almost thirty times its official price. Remarque’s Three Comrades, published in Russian in 1958, became ‘the novel – the Russian word roman can also mean “a love affair” – of a generation’, as one Soviet contemporary put ...”

“... understood culture according to a linguistic model, as a system of differences and oppositions (black/white, left/right, raw/cooked, whatever) to which individuals are subject, briefly represented a fashionable alternative in the 1960s, despite the anguished warning of one Communist intellectual that the theory would cause despair among the Renault workers ...”

“... its history as ‘the pre-eminent sea-fighting force of the post-1500 world’, in the words of Christopher McKee, resonated still in school history books, comics and war films (Officer with mug: ‘Cocoa, sir?’ Officer with binoculars: ‘Good man, Number One!’). The most popular cigarette brands suggested that seagoing manliness and smoking were one ...”

“... to return to it,’ Neal Ascherson wrote in the Scottish political review Q in 1975. The historian Christopher Harvie described the emigrant intellectuals who pepper Scottish history as ‘red Scots’: ‘cosmopolitan, self-avowedly “enlightened” and, given a chance, authoritarian, expanding into and exploiting greater and more bountiful fields than their ...”

“... be meaningless. It could be one of the last ways of keeping a secret. Then, take the influence of black music, black history. Indeed, it is there, and Dylan has consistently addressed himself to the social fate of American blacks. But Mellers’s mythic-mindedness leads him to not even discuss ‘The Lonesome Death of ...”

“... it. A book appeared, with Edward’s conclusion. The rift was over. In 1986 we met in New York. Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, he and I had been brigaded to discuss agendas for radical history at the New School. In the overflowing auditorium, hanging on his words, he was die image of a romantic orator: his bursts of passionate speech punctuated by that ...”

“... experiencing of them, should have enjoyed elaborate articulation in recent years. Both Said and Christopher Norris mention aspects of this, but they’ve obviously missed an article in a theory journal which called for a comprehensive ‘taxonomy of literary experiences’, expressly designed as a sort of manual of textual intercourse, and intended ‘(like ...”