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“... of English kings anxious to claim ancient authority, prestige and legitimacy for themselves. Henry Tudor even had the bright idea of calling his eldest son Arthur, presumably in the hope that at the appropriate time – for the legend of the ‘Once and Future King’ was already well established – gullible people would say: ‘Arthur has come ...”

“... blows last month in the literary pages of all the major papers over Darrieussecq’s latest novel, Tom est mort, a first-person narrative of a mother’s attempt to come to terms with the death of her small child ten years earlier. In 1995 Laurens had published Philippe, an autobiographical work about the death of her infant son the previous year. Darrieussecq ...”

“... whether Fanny Price should or should not accept the rakish – but seemingly reformed – charmer Henry Crawford. She doesn’t, as it happens, but the narrator tells us that she certainly would have, had things played out slightly differently or taken a bit longer to unravel: ‘Would he have persevered, and uprightly, Fanny must have been his reward, and a ...”

“... the self-styled skeleton in the cupboard, his three protagonists are Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore. Nash’s was a fine sensibility and Nicholson’s lyrical gifts are husbanded with a rigour rare in this country’s art: yet, of the three, it is only Moore that can be said to have had a marked influence on the language of 20th-century art as a ...”

“... he also found in his younger brother Thomas: a want of ‘rest’. It had all started so well: Tom gained the first at Oxford that eluded both Matthew and Clough; he was Clough’s model for Philip, the radical poet, in his poem The Bothie. But a mixture of religious doubt and social concern led Tom, like Philip, to seek ...”

“... in the Sixties was only about 10 per cent; and in their study of science fiction audiences, Henry Jenkins and John Tulloch note the continuing rejection of Star Trek by ‘the male establishment of literary science fiction fandom’. Actually, no group of fans can be called an establishment: none of them has any power at all, not even, for all the ...”

“... is better known for inventing a device that safely pulled an arrow from the face of the future Henry V, wounded in battle. I wonder what kinds of words issued from the royal tongue.Hindley argues that the 14th and 15th centuries saw greater concern with the secrecy of amuletic texts, a surprising side effect of the spread of literacy: as more people came ...”

“... military confrontation between Welsh armies and the newly established Lancastrian dynasty of Henry IV.By 1405 Glyn Dŵr was able to command the support of much of western Wales, had secured a treaty of friendship with the French, and had even enlisted two important English nobles, Sir Edmund Mortimer and ...”

“... have the novelist that they deserve.’ (I don’t think he means to be snide.) Dissenters such as Tom Carson, in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, seem disappointed that ‘the book isn’t unadulterated junk. Unexpectedly, it’s a work of some literary as well as reportorial skill, not to mention some literary as well as meretricious ambition.’ In the ...”

“... games and nibbling at the edges of philosophical debate, sometimes in the company of Oscar Wilde, Henry James, H.G. Wells and the Webbs. Today they are easily characterised as an unripened Bloomsbury Group: a celebrity clique composed of men and women unconventional in dress and conversation, literary and artistic, overlapping in their sexual commitments, but ...”

“... I have suggested, but they do meet with heavy visual competition. There are always shoot-outs, and Tom Cruise does a lot of running. In the first film he hangs from a long wire to make a CD copy of a file from a computer inside CIA headquarters. In the new one there is a nearly failed parachute drop, a rooftop chase in London, a lot of motorised whizzing ...”

“... Setting the World on Fire is in two minds. It embodies the minds in two brothers, Piers Mosson and Tom Mosson: the one with his head in the clouds, fated to become a red-carpet knight of the theatre, sure of his direction and of his directing; the other, with his feet on the ground, ready, steady, and going to be a lawyer. Each has sense and sensibility but in ...”

“... This is the first full-length study of James Thomson’s life and work since Henry Salt’s in 1889. Thomson’s poem The City of Dreadful Night is known by name to many but has seldom been reprinted or discussed. Histories of literature say more about an earlier James Thomson (1700-48) who wrote The Seasons and ‘Rule Britannia’ and got into Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, though Johnson says his diction was ‘florid and luxuriant ...”

“... gave the first of the four annual Frederick Ives Carpenter Lectures at the University of Chicago.1 Tom Mitchell, chairman of the English Department and editor of Critical Inquiry, the English-language journal in which Derrida most often publishes, introduced him to a crowd that filled not only the seats and aisles of the Max Palevsky Auditorium, but the ...”

“... literal. What those three paragraphs have in common are the three things that go to make up the Tom Wolfe effect. One, a glibness that is designed for speed-reading. Two, a facility with rapidly cross-cut images and references: a show of learning. Three, a strongly marked conservatism. It is the third of these features, Wolfe’s subliminal advertising for ...”