“... references, metafictional gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and David Foster Wallace (b.1962), the previous generation’s experimentalism was as much a way of looking at society as a renovation of novelistic technique. Writers their grouchier teachers viewed as rebarbatively modish or futuristic ...”

“... venerated alongside Alexander Pope, who held that ‘Most Women have no Characters at all,’ or Jonathan Swift, who, at the conclusion of that catalogue of excremental horrors ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’, has his speaker remark: ‘Should I the Queen of Love refuse,/Because she rose from stinking Ooze?’ Or even Samuel Johnson. If women’s writing ...”

“... with the precocious, mentally sound children who populate many recent novels (Oskar Schell in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, for example). But precocious children cease to be children, and thus to be precocious, whereas Will is fixed in place by his obsessions. It does not help him that many of his trivia, when they are not ...”

“... however, they were paramount. Here they eclipsed outlaw heroes of folk tradition – Dick Turpin, Jonathan Wild, Dick Sheppard – and usurped the leadership of the police in the fight against delinquency and disorder. The prolific Stephen Knight has calculated that Sherlock Holmes had at least 13 predecessors, some of them women. Most were quickly ...”

“... the interests of its ‘customers’ (as we say nowadays) is a question central to his book. Post-Restoration Londoners, he observes, got into a great lather over crime and criminals. They felt they were in the middle of what would now be called a ‘crime-wave’, endangering life and limb, persons and possessions. By the early 18th century all the talk ...”

“... and does not therefore deal with the problem of Eritrea and Ethiopia’s acquisition of it; the post-war performance of Haile Selassie’s government; the emergence of the Emperor as the patron of anti-imperialism and of Addis Ababa as the permanent seat of the Organisation of African Unity; the long struggle against the Eritreans and the Somalis; the ...”

“... to the US was still singling out his term in office as ‘the most fruitful and productive in the post-war years’. This upside to the Nixon picture is much to the fore in Aitken’s adoring biography. It is a strange coming-together: Aitken, the hereditary Tory, born with a large silver spoon in his mouth, and the lower-class Californian Nixon, engaged all ...”

“... The guarantees concerning privacy had literally to be iron-clad. On 1 January 1912, the General Post Office became to all intents and purposes the monopoly supplier of telephone services in the United Kingdom, and remained so until the creation of British Telecom in 1981. In 1912, phone boxes entered public service. They had thereafter to be ubiquitous, and ...”

“... public in recent months by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor. On 29 August, the Washington Post published excerpts from the annual budget for all national intelligence programmes, agency by agency, provided by Snowden. In consultation with the Obama administration, the newspaper chose to publish only a slim portion of the 178-page document, which has a ...”

“... of this has changed in our present? It is now said with tedious regularity that we live in a ‘post-truth’ age which radically differs from anything that came before. Sages and hacks alike grumble that postmodernism has formed a toxic alliance with online disinformation to dissolve the secure foundations on which truth, supposedly, once rested.These ...”

“... short on analysis and reflection. If Britain is by German and Japanese standards an inefficient post-industrial slum, our politicians and administrators have no doubt failed to stop it. What is less clear – and it’s a question which Ponting never stops to ask – is whether there was very much they could have done about it, and if so when. Was there ...”

“... of amnesia (or megalomania). The exclusion of Dorothea Tanning as of every other exponent of post-de Chirico Surrealism suppresses a key part of the story. The exclusion of Josef Albers shows bias. The exclusion of Mark di Suvero means the omission of the one artist (David Smith is something else) who has created a sculptural equivalent of Abstract ...”

“... passion into refinement’ and that the discourse of deportment rendered citizens amenable to the post-revolutionary government, keeping both painters and consumers in their places. The chapters focus on social events embodying that discourse: the development of small group portraits (the ‘conversation piece’) in the 1720s, of public pleasure gardens in ...”

“... roots has accordingly not bulked large in arguments over the American Revolution. Now that Jonathan Clark has discovered America, however, religion becomes the centrepiece of an interpretation which banishes all other explanations as anachronistic or incomplete. Clark is the man who put the Tory back into British history with his iconoclastic account ...”

“... Wordsworth’s early poetry has fostered some of the most sophisticated and wide-ranging post-war criticism in English. The three editions of Lyrical Ballads published in the Sixties for use in university teaching furthered this work, and from a scholarly point of view usefully complemented each other: W.J.B. Owen (1967) used the 1798 text, Derek ...”