“... of something before and beyond language. This is the concept of fantasy that allows Joan Scott in The Fantasy of Feminist History (2011) to investigate what is not captured by cultural construction, everything that eludes the conscious expression of ideas in language. By describing historical scripts about love as ‘fantasies’ Rosenwein seems to ...”

“... to be done – such as rubbishing the Heseltine campaign for leader in 1990 – Clark, the tycoon James Goldsmith and the zoo-keeper John Aspinall arranged a dinner with Conrad Black, owner of the Telegraph, to try to persuade him to order his (entirely independent) editor to stop backing Heseltine. Black refused, but we are left in no doubt that it is at ...”

“... meccano-work of literary theory. In conclave with her admiring if sceptical husband in Henry James’s novel The Golden Bowl, Fanny Assingham remarks of her efforts on behalf of the Prince and Charlotte – efforts which involve, at the highest level, resources of query, speculation, understanding – that whatever happens it will all have been ‘great ...”

“... else in Britain. The Report on a Highway Plan for Glasgow, produced by the consultant engineers Scott Wilson Kirkpatrick for the corporation in 1965, is extraordinarily bold. The city centre – in the report, a dense, slum-ridden, sooty horror – has been evacuated and encircled by a vast motorway on stilts. At Charing Cross, apart from the ...”

“... by the Murdoch publications. It is this public he is addressing when he offers his views on Pope, Scott, Carlyle, Heaney, Larkin etc. These assumptions contribute powerfully to his excellence as a reviewer, but he has other gifts, equally important though less spectacular. He knows how to combine economical information about the book he is discussing with a ...”

“... of letters of intimacy of any nature, except for some love-notes to the rather alarmed Brian James, the Australian actor White fell for in 1963. There are no letters to his mother Ruth and none to Manoly, who faithfully burnt them. There are early letters to lovers and ex-lovers, but so many doors are closed to us that our view of the novelist is only ...”

“... full version of the term, which has puzzled everybody, unduly I think. According to Liddell and Scott, the Greek ‘alektwr means ‘cock’, keraV, ‘horn’, ‘areskw, ‘to please’, and tauroV, of course, ‘bull’: hence the phrase means roughly ‘a horny cock pleasing to a bull’, reduced to ‘halek’ = ‘cock’. Forman’s Greek was ...”

“... with the wives answering the phones. Then: world domination. Welcome to the inside track on what Scott Fitzgerald called ‘the orgastic future’. In Britain, soap operas tend to be about poor people, and the drama of American capitalism can seem both obnoxious and ridiculous, yet the rise of CAA is a wonderful story of greed and genius. What is a good ...”

“... In The Green Knight we have to contend with Lucas and Clement Graffe, Harvey Blacket, Bellamy James and his dog Anax, the Anderson women – Louise and her daughters Alethea (Aleph), Sophia (Sefton) and Moira (Moy) – Emil and Clive and the Adwardens. A reader alert to social differences will find such names far from neutral. An odour of class hangs ...”

“... of the Modern has the crowd scenes and bustle of the historiography of its period, the age of Scott, Guizot, Thiers and de Tocqueville. The language, on the other hand, practised, vigorous, unreflective and rather characterless, belongs to modern serious journalism. Johnson’s four interweaving themes – ‘big’ politics, commerce and ...”

“... from Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (very clearly a novel about conflict between species) to James Blish’s A Case of Conscience (surely the only novel ever to have been based on a thorough reading of George Gosse’s Omphalos, his totally discredited reconciliation of Darwin and the Book of Genesis). Yet the questions remain, are even stimulated by ...”

“... a marketing tag, not a manifesto – caused a stir when it was published in the US in June. James Wood reviewed it at length in the New Yorker. Heti, he said, ‘may well have identified a central dialectic of 21st-century postmodern being’, but he also complained that her ‘prose is what one might charitably call basic’. The radical feminist ...”

“... down-home cousin hoodoo, the traditions of the ‘Mardi Gras Indians’, Professor Longhair and James Booker and Sam Cooke and Jelly Roll Morton and a hundred other croaking, squeaking, grunting voices of the bayou, levée and gulf. Animal voices and fish voices and spirit voices: a graveyard full of ghosts, old and young, all trying to make themselves ...”

“... of the subject there, and to have scripted the contributions assigned to the Ettrick Shepherd, James Hogg. One scholar has asserted that the imaginary Hogg was an improvement on the real one, but the contributions do not bear this out. What did ‘James Hogg’ think of the ‘proceedings of these two Irish ...”

“... University Library (and in a 1973 facsimile, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli). According to James West, editor of Trimalchio, the typescript of 27 October constitutes a completed version: ‘Naturally he expected to see proofs, and surely he planned to do some revising on them, but there is no evidence that, on 27 October, he contemplated major ...”