“... many gifts to the study of Russia. He could handle many languages, and his training as a Classical scholar gave him a capacity for careful drafting and textual criticism. He had also had a very wide experience of life, for he had been a diplomat and a journalist (assistant editor of the Times) as well as an academic. The Russian character fascinated him. His ...”

“... the little magazines, and traditional critical journals such as Partisan Review and the American Scholar. It is not published in New York. 6. The golden age of criticism is widely regarded by sober, intelligent people as a bad thing. It is seen as anarchistic, esoteric, obscure, élitist and academic. It is regarded by persons of traditional common sense as ...”

“... Martha Nussbaum is a classical scholar and moral philosopher who in several books and a great many essays has advanced a thesis about the cognitive power of emotions. Feeling, she says, is part of thought. Only accidents of usage and the rationalist prepossessions of modern philosophy could have made us think otherwise ...”

“... American, Morris Zapp. Lodge had got his significant detail wrong – Swallow should be a scholar of Charles Lamb (the ‘gentle-hearted’) – but the broad allusion did pretty much what was wanted, assuring the theoretically advanced that they were now top dogs. Condescension usually has an anxious motive. Eliot, as Tom Paulin is on hand to ...”

“... us more tightly into a neoliberal regime.’ Gill is describing an instance of what the American scholar Lauren Berlant calls ‘cruel optimism’. People open themselves to exploitation when the sense of self-worth that derives from doing something they believe in comes up against a hierarchical authority that is secretive, arbitrary and ruthless. Cruel ...”

“... slew of 23 dedications which includes such flat entireties as these: – For F. Chesney Horwood, scholar and friend. – For Essie and Diana Browning, with affection. The other side of this warm welcome by Room is his compensatory need to give his guests the cold shoulder. He keeps up a sour commentary for the run of the book. Though his chosen ...”

“... Lyndon Johnson is alive. James Jones is alive. Jim Morrison and Robert Penn Warren are alive. Richard Nixon is dead; and a Soviet-bloc skier named Ivana Trump – someone overhears Sixties psychic Jeanne Dixon saying – will assign her name to a novel she does not write with the full and worldwide backing of one of America’s largest publishing ...”

“... of logic’, and he composed a series of dialogues between a Catholic priest and an indigenous scholar, designed to demonstrate the balance of logic and faith lying at the heart of the Western spiritual tradition, and hence Christianity’s superiority. Missionaries were followed by diplomats (allowed into Peking when the Qing Government succeeded the ...”

“... of the Shavian spirit has not invaded Mr Laurence after all these years. He is a great enough scholar to let in more generosity without letting down his standards – a skill at which Shaw himself was an adept. One sign of this curious misalliance between GBS and the leading Shavian of our age has been the use of dedications. Shaw believed that the ...”

“... of Fabianism; Michael Stewart to its bourgeoisie. Jay is a quintessential mandarin: old Wykhamist, scholar of New College, Fellow of All Souls. At 29, after spells on the Times and the Economist, he was appointed City Editor of the Daily Herald. At 30, he published an influential work of socialist theory, which anticipated many of the ...”

“... but the result is not unequivocally felicitous. Let us take the matter of reading. As a thinker, scholar, preacher, poet, reformer, philosopher – whatever he considered himself (the point is not an idle one: once he had left the Church, he could never quite define what his vocation was) – Emerson obviously spent a large amount of his time with books. His ...”

“... as if with an eye to leaving a crisp morsel for the historian. In his 1974 biography of Pepys, Richard Ollard said that there clings to him ‘an irresistible air of bedroom farce’, with ‘furtive lecheries so vivaciously pursued’. The earlier multi-volume life by Sir Arthur Bryant had done much to rescue him from his popular reputation of Slippery ...”

“... an infuriating wallflower, eavesdropping on the glorious beauty of Shelley’s marriage to Mary. Richard Holmes’s unsurpassable biography, Shelley: The Pursuit, written in the ‘golden years’ of the early Seventies, was the first to rescue Claire from the patronage of the Shelley-worshippers and to introduce her as a political thinker, who not only ...”

“... drawn into the company of the so-called Real Whigs, dissenting intellectuals like Thomas Hollis, Richard Barron, Sylas Neville and Caleb Fleming. She also met and initially admired John Wilkes, whose radicalism took a far more activist form. It was – presumably – in discussions and arguments with men such as these that she hit upon the idea of ...”

“... of State making an almost identical remark. It is with this episode that the young American scholar Scott Lucas, in the introduction to Divided we stand, opens his meticulously researched and pleasantly written examination of the 1956 crisis seen as a landmark in Anglo-American relations. What started as a PhD thesis has been happily transmogrified into ...”