“... and in improvidence, runaway inflation and overmighty trade unions in economic terms. Neither Harold Wilson’s Labour Administration, nor the Europhile Tory, Edward Heath, was capable of arresting national drift and decay. But then, at last, a saviour emerged. Like other saviours, she was an outsider, but all the more powerful for that. ‘I have only ...”

“... well as by a channel to the south. The mental planet that is peopled by Alfred and the Danes and Harold and the Conqueror has no place whatsoever for Hywell Dda, for Brian Boru, for Kenneth Mac Alpin or Macbeth.’ The culprits here were the Victorian historians, writing from and into their imperial time, as if all previous events had led up to the glorious ...”

“... can be no individual author. Karel van der Toorn is the perfect – and bracing – antithesis to Harold Bloom. Bloom, whose point of departure as a critic is English Romantic poetry and in particular Blake’s relationship to Milton, has based much of his career on the conception of the writer as a bold individual genius struggling with the geniuses who came ...”

“... one reason he slotted so well into its pages. His heroes were the great humourists of the 1940s, James Thurber and S.J. Perelman, and, like them, he often wrote of beleaguered men who struggle with a world that seems to be ...”

“... Co opened in 1919. In the window were editions of Shakespeare (of course), Chaucer, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and copies of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (Monnier’s favourite English-language book). On the walls were photographs of Oscar Wilde, drawings by William Blake and examples of Walt Whitman’s early writings. Émigré writers and French ...”

“... themselves within a political heritage usually misrepresent their forbears: the Spenserians of James I’s reign, and Milton after them, re-cast Spenser in their own image. The process Norbrook describes, of adaptation within continuity, runs parallel to, and seems largely to have been created by, the tradition which has been located by Simon Adams in the ...”

“... Glaswegian socialism into a laboratory of protest and policy, publishing the revolutionaries James Connolly and John Maclean as well as those, like Johnston himself and John Wheatley, who hoped socialism could come through parliamentary representation. Helen Crawfurd, Mary Barbour, Mary Laird and Agnes Dollan of the Glasgow Women’s Housing Association ...”

“... meaning of these figures. It is difficult for any friendly reader of these poems not to act like Harold Ross, sometime editor of the New Yorker, who would scribble ‘WHO HE?’ in the margins of any copy that struck him as insufficiently explaining its references. But to translate these poems into historical gossip is to miss the whole original meaning they ...”

“... was the quality of the work of the surgeons who performed open-heart operations, two of whom, James Wisheart and Janardan Dhasmana, were struck off even before Ian Kennedy’s report was published. The problems at the infirmary had become public largely through the efforts of Stephen Bolsin, a consultant anaesthetist with an interest in clinical audit, a ...”

“... admiration is Ted Solotaroff’s essay, ‘Silence, Exile and Cunning’ (1970), which antedates Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence by three years. There, Solotaroff shows how the aspiring writer’s mind, locked in the cell of its preconceptions, receives visits from real life, but for the most part gets down to serving the sentence. Flaubert was the ...”

“... Rex Ingram’s The Magician (1926), drawn from a Maugham novel, mysteriously incorporated into the James Whale Frankenstein and subsequently acquiring the generic name of Igor – by his grudging response to one of the few occasions when a disability materialises as an aspect of the hero. Howard Breslin’s short story ‘Bad Day at Honda’ has an explicitly ...”

“... gay literature the novels of William Burroughs and Jean Genet or the poetry of Allen Ginsberg or James Merrill simply because these works are superior, serious and consecrated is a rearguard action designed to trivialise the label ‘gay art’. It is also a strategy to recuperate for a purely imaginary if politically charged category of ‘universal ...”

“... it becomes more sceptical and sexually adventurous. Byron’s two most important poems, Childe Harold and Don Juan, are also problematic texts, since they were censored and distorted, to a degree that significantly changed their direction, by the publisher Murray. Coleridge himself went on editorialising and re-interpreting ‘The Ancient Mariner’, which ...”

“... clear, is disingenuous: Lee stayed – unlike many of the Clydesiders whose ties to the ILP leader James Maxton were as strong as hers – because she didn’t want to compromise her socialist principles. She believed in fighting for socialism against the enemy, which was sometimes within: ‘I wanted to take part in a political contest where the alignments ...”