“... of that year, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Geoffrey Grigson, Michael Roberts, Bonamy Dobrée, John Hayward and Graham Greene had nominated Auden as the new voice. The six odes and the epilogue of The Orators, Greene said, justified Auden’s ‘being named in the same breath as Lawrence’.But Greene had some misgivings. ‘The subject of the book,’ he ...”

“... His family could not give him what he needed most – good criticism – and friends such as Joseph Arnould and Alfred Domett, who were ready with advice, seem to have been asked for it only rarely. Browning’s attachment to the monologue form must have a root in this partly self-constructed lack of sympathetic surroundings. The feeling of oddness and ...”

“... human context, in the midst of a like-minded radical intelligentsia: William Frend, George Dyer, John Thelwall, Basil Montagu, John Tweddell, Felix Vaughan, James Losh, Joseph Fawcett. Roe’s research has been strenuous, his attention to detail earnest, and his book will be useful. But ...”

“... interests confined to Shakespeare: among those the countess patronised were James Thomson, John Gay and George Frideric Handel (of whom she painted a portrait), all of them occasional guests at the Ashley-Cooper family seat, St Giles House, at Wimborne St Giles in Dorset.My interest was much piqued by the fact that I knew the Wimborne St Giles ...”

“... of Fehling’s thesis of Herodotus the literary liar is widely detectable in recent work. John Marincola makes an intriguing case for Herodotus sometimes imitating the tall-story-telling of Odysseus, and expecting his audience, familiar since childhood with the Odyssey, to know when he was doing it. But this is to project on the past the sophisticated ...”

“... Joseph Schumpeter had a refreshing sense of socialism. For him, it had almost no fixed sense at all. ‘A society may be fully and truly socialist and yet be led by an absolute ruler or be organised in the most democratic of all possible ways; it may be aristocratic or proletarian; it may be a theocracy and hierarchic or atheist and indifferent to religion; it may be much more strictly disciplined than men are in a modern army or completely lacking in discipline; it may be ascetic or eudemonist in spirit; energetic or slack; thinking only of the future or the day; warlike and nationalist or peaceful and internationalist; equalitarian or the opposite; it may have the ethics of lords or the ethics of slaves; its art may be subjective or objective; its forms of life individualistic or standardised ...”

“... the advances in the physical and chemical techniques of the 1930s. The young scientist was John Kendrew, one of many inspired by such conversations to win the Nobel Prize, which escaped his travel companion. But it might have been anyone, male or female, who ever came within earshot of that stumpy, bohemian visionary genius with the uncontrollable head ...”

“... like Beaverbrook who ‘failed to secure the re-election of Churchill in 1945’. The entry on John Masefield strikes a new note. ‘In “Sea Fever” he wrote: “I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gipsy life,” but, in fact, he had settled in London, and in 1907 began to work on the Manchester Guardian.’ Naturally one turns to Yeats to ...”

“... biographies and T.H. Huxley not so many fewer, yet Smith has been celebrated only by his nephew John Phillips in 1844 (Phillips was later to be a distinguished geological professor at Oxford). Since then, there has been a handful of scholarly articles by Joan Eyles, but otherwise Smith seems to have escaped the attention lavished on those who followed and ...”

“... by an obscure one entirely because of its associational value. A small watercolour seascape by John Constable, though unfinished, trails clouds of reflected glory from the familiar Romantic landscapes and the atmospheric intensity of his big ‘six-footer’ canvases. If, however, paper analysis reveals it to be a work of the 1840s, probably by ...”

“... an elaborate theatrical spectacle, appealing to the emotions instead of reason. At the centre of John Barrell’s exhaustive study of treason in the mid-1790s is a brilliantly sustained argument about the struggle to fix the character of the word ‘imagination’. Unlike the battle then being fought over such important political terms as ...”

“... denounced as a bigoted member of the old order. RLT brooks no opposition and no questioning. (Joseph Schumpeter’s dictum still goes unheeded: ‘Obviously, we cannot say everywhere else is ideology; we alone stand on the rock of absolute truth.’) Washington looks at some typical RLT feminist arguments and concludes that they assume certain truths as ...”

“... facets. The bulk of the narrative takes place in 1936. The hero is Joe of Paterson, also known as Joseph Korzeniowski (the choice of Conrad’s Polish name evidently has some tricksy significance). An 18-year-old hobo victim of the Great Depression, Joe first takes up work in a freak show – partly for ideological reasons: ‘I had to acclimate myself to the ...”

“... China since the 1970s – among them Lloyd Eastman’s The Nationalist Era in China (1991) and Joseph Fewsmith’s Party, State and Local Elites in Republican China (1984) – but Fenby’s is only the third comprehensive biography of Chiang in more than three decades (the others are by Robert Payne and Brian Crozier). He is still a formidable challenge to ...”

“... the years, the rowdy writers’ room also included Simon, Gelbart, Carl Reiner, Michael Stewart, Joseph Stein and Woody Allen. Tolkin, who was head writer on all Caesar’s shows in the 1950s, said that ‘no other comedian needed material to open his mouth as much as he did, being an uneducated lout.’The writers’ room was a storytelling laboratory. For ...”