“... be said that the volumes under review offer much aid to understanding what was happening inside John Lennon’s mind. Of those people who should not attempt to write biographies of Lennon, Ray Coleman heads the list. A trade editor who might as well have been writing about agricultural machinery as music, he embodies everything Lennon had to fight: social ...”

“... William Small was teaching Rhetoric and Belles Lettres to Jefferson at William and Mary. By 1768 John Witherspoon from the Laigh Kirk, Paisley, was basing his Princeton lectures on Blair’s Rhetoric. In 1781 Wither spoon coined the pejorative term ‘Americanism’, by analogy with ‘Scotticism’. Strong connections between Scottish and American cultures ...”

“... her siblings’ madness. Harold was less enthusiastic. He had his own nightmares – one starred John Galsworthy ‘belabouring’ him with a huge steak – and his own sexual problems: he climbed into bed on his wedding night grunting ‘Come here, boy.’ He may have been disturbed by Mew’s quaintness; he certainly found her difficult. When he published ...”

“... was homosexual.’ Thirty years later, when Eliot’s prestige and influence were at their zenith, John Peter, a Canadian academic, published an article in Essays in Criticism called ‘A New Interpretation of The Waste Land’. Peter argued that the poem was at heart an elegy that might be compared to Tennyson’s In Memoriam: ‘At some previous time the ...”

“... be disappointed. Born in 1882, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was the first surviving child of John and May Joyce, whose recent marriage had been fiercely opposed by both sets of parents. Their first baby, named after his father, had died at barely two months. The first healthy son was crucial affirmation for the marriage and, although 13 further births ...”

“... he was always a storyteller for boys, in the tradition (a very good one) of R.L. Stevenson and John Buchan. In A Sort of Life, which was as near to an autobiography as he was ever prepared to go (and itself the result of psychotherapy for a period of writer’ block), Greene tells how he first came to keep a record of his dreams. Though it’ not at all ...”

“... an idyllic boyhood, much influenced by an extraordinary uncle, Sir Wyndham Deedes, a sort of Lawrence of Arabia character, who threw up a proconsular career in the Middle East to establish a mission in the East End of London. Deedes spent some time there during the school holidays from Harrow. For a time his family owned Saltwood Castle, now the lair of ...”

“... presidency, especially in the first term, was largely a third Bill Clinton term: Rahm Emanuel, Lawrence Summers, Tom Donilon, Leon Panetta, John Podesta and Hillary Clinton were called back and held over. The interlude of subsequent personal enrichment by Clinton, trading on her prestige and inside knowledge, has drawn ...”

“... but to appreciate his extraordinary gifts. The Ashmolean, thanks to the enthusiasm of Thomas Lawrence, possesses the largest and most representative collection of drawings by Raphael. These have been supplemented by important loans from other British and foreign collections to create an exhibition which is unlikely to be matched in Britain for several ...”

“... Hesse? Others don’t seem to belong here: despite the apparent novelty, the crushed car parts of John Chamberlain and the large abstract spider by Louise Bourgeois are more conventional as sculpture than other objects on view.Several artists live up to top billing. The galleries devoted to the white monochromes of Robert Ryman allow us to see, as in a ...”

“... randomly managing his verse-lines, evinces a far greater contempt for the common man than Yeats or Lawrence or Pound, who so vehemently castigated that man for not being other than he is. Thomas, in a not very considered nor memorable quatrain, has declared himself concerning the English poet of this century who (quite wrongly, I think) has been declared the ...”

“... are (retrogressively) infatuated with the past, don’t square up with 20th-century practice. Lawrence and Joyce held onto their roots even in exile, and there was always MacDiarmid, whose ‘Gairmscoile’ stands the Modernist argument on its head: It’s soon’, no’ sense, that faddoms the herts o’ men, And by my sangs the rouch auld Scots I ken ...”

“... was an annex of manners. The triply-named bookman – Arthur Quiller-Couch, Arthur Clutton-Brock, John Cann Bailey – fumed or fawned for seven hundred inconsequential words and then retired to his club, where he could doze amid a cloudy consensus. At times intellectual life was more strenuous than that. May quotes from the diary of ...”

“... This time the victim was a Christian missionary called Benjamin Weir. In January 1985, Father Lawrence Jenco was captured, to be followed three months later by Terry Anderson. Where was Ollie North all this time? In 1981, he was plucked from the Marines to serve on the National Security Council, which is attached to the White House. This was, North is too ...”

“... an alarming number of others seem to have stepped straight out of the condescending dreams of D.H. Lawrence and Malcolm Lowry, all immemorial wisdom and ethnic patience. They say things like ‘The soul of Mexico is very old,’ or ‘The road has its own reasons and no two travellers will have the same understanding of those reasons,’ or (in ...”