“... There would be more genuine rejoicing at the discovery of a complete new novel by Jane Austen than any other literary discovery, short of a new play by Shakespeare, that one can imagine.’ Brian Southam begins his Introduction to ‘Grandison’ by quoting the apparently prophetic observation of Margaret Drabble in 1974 ...”

“... learned to read Western books; so was China, even though its unwieldy bulk left the national idea more amorphous. In Vietnam a national consciousness. Hodgkin writes, ‘was certainly emerging during the early medieval period’, or the tenth to 15th centuries, with roots much deeper. The country’s names for itself were oddly various, and ‘Viet ...”

“... swamp rat whose self-presentation is somewhere between Kris Kristofferson (in one of Peckinpah’s more unbuttoned ventures) and Gary Snyder. Neat prose to surf in short sharp bursts, each cross-cut segment with a hook in its tail. Impotent fantasies aimed against the ravages of developers and despoilers, incomers, fixers, quacks, swarthy New York hoods with ...”

“... so the ‘hapless lover’s dull shame sinks/Away sometimes in day-dreams, and he thinks/No more of yesterday’s disgrace and foil.’ The disgrace was personal. By the time he was writing the poem, the Red House was sold and Jane was involved with Rossetti, who called her Lucrezia Borgia and documented their affair in blazing portraits. Morris ...”

“... lecture to the staff and patients at Bellevue, recounting his visits to Pueblo Indian settlements more than a quarter of a century earlier. He expounded on the scenes he had witnessed among the Hopi tribe in Arizona, through whose customs and dances he believed ‘American prehistory’ could be understood. Central to his analysis, though he did not observe ...”

“... counterculture as a chronicler of psychedelia and fringe religion. By then he had published more than thirty novels, most of them as fleeting mass-market paperbacks, and well over a hundred short stories, most of them in SF magazines. By dying in March, Dick missed the May premiere of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, the first movie made from his ...”

“... a leitmotif in Heaney, associated with the freedom of the imagination and with his belief that a more inclusive definition of Irishness can ease the problems of the North. His ‘ground’ has also shifted, not just in the sense that migration from Ulster to Wicklow has been followed by transatlantic shuttling between Dublin, Harvard and Oxford, but ...”

“... says Allen. ‘Sympathetic,’ huffs little Jack, as if ready to embrace death. A minute or so more of this, then Kerouac begins to read from his novel, while the host licks away at the keys. As he reads from the very end of his book he seems to see the corny world lift: ‘and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn ...”

“... Augusta, married, fathered at least two children, and separated again. He had exiled himself, more or less wilfully, from his ‘native shore’, fallen out of favour with his public, embarked on his greatest work, and begun his final liaison with an Italian countess. Murray was 33 when he accepted Childe Harold for publication. That poem, and the flurry ...”

“... regardless of the relative risks. Violent threat is what they are familiar with, so they see it as more threatening; this is what you would expect of anyone who was forced to spend much of their time in the company of soldiers and police officers. But as well as being shaped by professional circumstances, individual attitudes to risk are also shaped by ...”

“... your customers are telling you have their most immediate applications. But the authors are usually more ambitious than this and want to apply their notions beyond the confines of management studies – and in social policy. If businesses can use the wisdom of crowds to predict what people really want, to innovate new ways of providing it, and to test whether ...”

“... saying so at home it was as if I’d signed my own death warrant.TB was to blame for other more bizarre prohibitions. We were never allowed to wear open-necked shirts, for instance, lest the cold ‘go to your chest’. Sharing a bottle of pop with other boys was another deathtrap, as was not wearing a vest or drinking unaired water.TB was pretty well ...”

“... a commitment to paradigmatic notions of system and method that set it apart from other, more free-ranging styles of semiotic activity. It was the failure to achieve this ambition – or the problems thrown up in pursuit of it – that led to the widespread shift of direction signalled by French post-structuralism. It is simplifying matters to treat ...”

“... grey’. In each example, Kipling’s language is patently not inert, but, like the harp of True Thomas, birls and brattles in Kipling’s hands. We think of Kipling as a special, borderline case, but he is not. Arnold memorably damn ed Pope and Dryden as ‘classics of our prose’ in his essay ‘The Study of Poetry’, a critical manoeuvre Eliot then used ...”

“... genius, and such minds are privileged to think alike. Ackroyd himself makes this claim, if rather more tactfully than his publicity. Biographies, as he asserts in his opening and closing remarks, should be agents of ‘true knowledge’ and ‘real knowledge’ and this is gained by inspired intuition, mystical inwardness. Ackroyd, we apprehend, is close to ...”