“... Girls (Atria, £20), Adam Morgan does a terrific job telling its history and that of its founder, Margaret C. Anderson. The book is heady with Anderson’s velocity of expression; with the dash that fetched her male admirers, including Hemingway, and female lovers, including (perhaps) Emma Goldman; with the zeal that serialised Ulysses and got her taken to ...”

“... under the headline ‘RADICAL’s campaign threatens MARGIN of labour in britain’. Anthony Lewis, the journalist from the Times, had accompanied Gott one morning as he braved ‘the snow and chill of north-east England’ to knock on doors. With his bushy red beard and beret, Lewis wrote, Gott made a striking ...”

“... whose views about art differed deeply from his own. He was overwhelmed on first meeting Wyndham Lewis, called him ‘a great and scandalously ignored painter’, and as late as 1932 said Lewis was ‘by far the most active force among us’. But he nursed feelings of resentment that his admiration was not ...”

“... Slave Towers. As it happens, Maggie Muggins is also a private name: Social Security know her as Margaret Moon. There are two main events to Maggie’s day. She discovers that her queer playmate, Sean, has thrown himself under a train. He is, in the odd terminology of the LT billboard, ‘a body on the line’. And her father comes down from the North to ...”

“... Ramsey’s, one shared with Keynes. In philosophy: Ramsey sentences, the Ramsey test, the Ramsey-Lewis theory of reference, and the Mill-Ramsey-Lewis account of natural laws. Many of his ideas were so groundbreaking that they were taken up in earnest only decades later. This phenomenon has also been named after him: the ...”

“... Ever since the rise of Margaret Thatcher, personal responsibility has been the irresistible itch that the Conservative Party dare not scratch – at least not in public. Notwithstanding the party’s boosterish slogans of enterprise, freedom and low taxation, many of its elderly members – and some of its politicians – have long held to a more cautious ethos of middle-class respectability, restraint and downright frugality ...”

“... and furtive, of her own body. The atmosphere in her photographs is literary – tricked up out of Lewis Carroll, Poe and Surrealism – as well as knowingly indebted to photographers from Julia Margaret Cameron to Duane Michals. One of the effects of the current survey of her work at Victoria Miro (until 22 January) is that ...”

“... effects have survived the deepening disillusionment with the Iraqi and Afghan interventions. John Lewis Gaddis is a true product of this nationalist ideology and the imperial establishment it supports. Take this statement, from his short history of the Cold War: Americans, he writes, are ‘impatient with hierarchy, at ease with flexibility, and profoundly ...”

“... affair in middle age finally alters the impression of her essential solitude. When R.W.B. Lewis published his biography of the novelist in 1975, its revelations about her adulterous affair with the American journalist, Morton Fullerton, inevitably attracted much attention: especially when combined with the printing of ‘Beatrice Palmato’, a ...”

“... and generosity (he wanted to make a magazine where he himself, Eliot, Joyce and Wyndham Lewis could appear regularly – an annexe to the Vortex – but was determined to accept anything that had quality). Much of the detail lacks interest, however, and it is hard to avoid the ungrateful reflection that, since the fine detail is largely of concern ...”

“... line supposed to demonstrate two of the received national characteristics, class and modesty. Then Margaret Thatcher died (her funeral was another good show) and there was a lot of talk about the way the country had changed since she became prime minister, a year before I joined Mrs Hazel’s class. Arguments ran along predictable lines: the privatisation of ...”

“... he could not afford and which drove him into dependence on Poulson and others. The fascination of Lewis Baston’s excellent study lies largely in the unfolding inevitability of this morality tale. The movement from the young Maudling, working genially alongside Iain Macleod and Enoch Powell in the late 1940s – Rab Butler’s three brilliant young men, all ...”

“... He did not live long. Like many of the most vigorous and productive women novelists of the period (Margaret Oliphant, Frances Trollope, Mary Ward, Julia Kavanagh), Ellen Wood wrote to support her family. The preoccupation with the precariousness of health and fortune that haunts her fiction was the product of experience. Unexplained decline and death is a ...”

“... imports. The poetry section is still weirder: Larkin one can understand, from Hamilton; also Alun Lewis, Roy Fuller, Frost and Graves. But Wilbur and Merrill, Heaney and Motion? I’m not surprised there’s little evidence of attachment to their work, just oblique dismay. For any sort of poetic credo, you have to go back to the poems, or the essays in A ...”

“... during his childhood her ill-health took precedence over his. While she was cossetted, the sickly Lewis (as he was then called) was left to the charge of ‘Cummy’, the nurse who slept in his room until he was ten and who drove him into night terrors that only she could calm. Her entertainments amounted to a non-stop Hammer movie – ‘blood-curdling tales ...”