“... earnestness rather than a little less. One of the attractions of nonsense poetry both as reading matter and as a subject for critical prose is that it appears to offer a holiday from all that dreary business of worrying about what the poet might be trying to say: centuries before the French Symbolists started going on about it, some English comic verse had ...”

“... the anti-Vietnam and Civil Rights movements, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, all of which seemed to matter a great deal more. For my part, I found that, with the exception of a few people like Chomsky and the late Eqbal Ahmad, no one in ‘the movement’ wanted anything to do with me or my interest in violations of Palestinian rights as a result of Israel’s ...”

“... not only the lofty civilisation tended by Kenneth Clark, but also the high Modernism advanced by Herbert Read at the ICA; it also rejected the sentimental view of (British) folk culture in opposition to (American) popular culture held by such critics as Richard Hoggart. ‘American films and magazines were the only live culture we knew as kids,’ Banham ...”

“... tells a much more nuanced story. From the start, she emphasises that Latin was always as much a matter of ritual as of substance. True, the school, from the 16th century on, was ‘Latin country’. Boys were required to speak Latin in Renaissance classrooms, where spies, known as ‘foxes’, informed on those who slipped into the vernacular. Masters ...”

“... in universities, the professions and white-collar jobs aroused resentment. Native, endemic and matter-of-fact, anti-Jewish prejudice now became frenzied, and the student outbursts were brutal. In the spring of 1932, rioting closed down the university in Bucharest, and precipitated the dissolution of the Iron Guard, which now had Ionescu’s sympathy. In ...”

“... may be significant: even when playing with strangers, the figure one cuts in their eyes may matter. Nevertheless, a simple conclusion is that players of the ultimatum game are oriented to a norm that enjoins ‘fairness’, and perceived violations of the norm are punished, even at personal cost, by rejection of unfair offers. If people are not homines ...”

“... clear that this leaves a lacuna of some three months in Xenophon’s text. Explanations remain a matter of guesswork. Did he fail to keep a diary? Or did poor leadership on Xenophon’s part lead to the death of some of his men in the late winter snows, deaths he didn’t want to admit to? We will never know. The point, rather, is the deceptive smoothness of ...”

“... the Federal Government’. The order affirms that there are only two sexes, male and female, as a matter of ‘immutable biological reality’; that men are biological males and women biological females; and that any suggestion otherwise has a ‘corrosive impact’ on ‘the validity of the entire American system’. This is the declaration of the reinstated ...”

“... my Father’s ground to any House or town,’ sounding as if she were a ghost. It was not just a matter of not leaving the property, however. She ran away from guests who came to the door, which caused her brother on at least one occasion to scold her for rudeness, so that she felt ‘quite chagrined and wretched’. Increasingly she hid from friends who ...”

“... which rivalled Berkeley for radicalism – the students’ two great intellectual heroes were Herbert Marcuse and himself. The idea of ‘being a guru’, he said, ‘scared the shit out of me’.Campus radicals seized on Kuhn’s book as a brilliantly subversive exposé. Just as they had suspected, science wasn’t the open-minded objective pursuit of ...”

“... that Trump went off topic 50 per cent of the time compared to Biden’s 30 per cent. It didn’t matter. Only one man looked like he knew where he was.The Trump-Biden debate stands as an indictment of America’s political system: something has gone badly wrong when an elderly politician with Trump’s flaws of character and competence can be provided with a ...”

“... extreme Islamists’ or ‘Islamic extremist terrorists’), Black Lives Matter and Hillary Clinton. The proceedings opened with a benediction from a pastor asking for God’s help in defeating the ‘enemy’: Clinton and the ‘liberal Democratic Party’. Mothers told sad stories of their deceased children. Two had been murdered in ...”

“... Manners, writing to her fiancé, Duff Cooper, in 1919. ‘Her’ was Venetia Montagu, the light of Herbert Asquith’s life when he was prime minister, but now sharing a Paris hotel room with a small, grinning Canadian millionaire. This ‘deformity’ was Max Aitken, still only forty but already – despite the private objections of George V – sitting in ...”

“... poets here: the translators of the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Donne, Marlowe, Herbert, Milton, Marvell, Pope, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Hardy, Kipling, Yeats, Eliot, Larkin, Berryman, Stevens, Frost – all figure prominently. Much of what Ricks has to say on this score, especially in relation to what Dylan owes to ...”

“... writes. Ralph’s mother, Ida, worked as a janitor and maid to raise Ralph and his brother, Herbert. She died in Cincinnati, at 52, possibly from tuberculosis of the hip. Mentored by members of the Oklahoma City black elite who saw promise in the boy, Ralph first escaped his family in 1933, through his early musical talent, travelling to the all-black ...”