“... 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 ...”

“... years later. He branched out into new publications, notably Comic Cuts. Helped by his brother Harold’s managerial and financial acumen, his titles were selling a million copies a week by 1892, two million by 1894. The brothers then took over the moribund Evening News and made it the country’s most successful evening daily by expanding the sports ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... after death is to write it himself. And if he entertains pretensions to prolixity, it helps, as Harold Macmillan was the first to admit, if you own a publishing house as well. This diminished celebration of the recently-departed has been paralleled by a scholarly reaction against biographies of the more distantly-deceased. The Victorians’ confident vigour ...”

“... thinking, and that clear thinking was essential to social health. This explains his choice of Harold Laski as a principal target in the essay on ‘Politics and the English Language’. But his extreme fastidiousness goes beyond that intelligible concern for straight as against crooked or muddled thinking. Good prose must have a force, a dignity, that ...”