“... In​ David Hare’s play The Absence of War, the Kinnock-like party leader, George Jones, is a tragic figure. His wit, his passion and his ability to extemporise are gradually extinguished, with his connivance, by a party machine that spends its time trying to out-Tory the Tories. They obey the polls religiously, yet still the voters aren’t ‘churning ...”

“... earth in a cottage in North Yorkshire, home of a lady born to the not very Gallic surname of Parry-Jones, who had a treasured cache of family documents in a trunk that had come to rest there after a sojourn in Chile. Another great dossier of papers was discovered in a château in Périgord. Now, after Lougee’s efforts in France, the Hague, Kent Record Office ...”

“... others’ eyes, she plunges us among her family and friends without introduction. Her mother, Mair Jones, became Surraya Suleri, ‘redistributing herself through several new syllables’. Her father ‘colonised’ her mother’s body with the five children, Ifat, Shahid, Sara, Iillat, Irfan. As Pakistan, ‘where history is synonymous with ...”

“... any Scots from the indictment (though – unkindest cut – he does exonerate one Welshman, David Jones). Worse still for Crawford, Kenner announces, ‘There’s no longer an English literature’: by which he means that, whereas ‘talent has not been lacking’ – on the contrary, ‘good poets are dispersed round the land’ and each has a personal ...”

“... were affectionate but equivocal. They had been close friends at Cambridge, along with Hallam and James Spedding, and FitzGerald had hero-worshipped Tennyson and his verse. Tennyson called him ‘old Fitz’, patronised him, and accepted from him quite large sums of money, being subsidised at one point to the tune of three hundred a year, a large figure in ...”

“... that straight. And as was said by Horne Tooke (nomen est omen again), recently revived by D.A.N. Jones in the London Review: ‘Right is no other than rectum.’ Some American reviewers, obsessed with Mailer’s alimony and with him as a quick buck, have deprecated the writing in this book. I can’t think that they were attending. To, for ...”

“... needy ones ’at clusters all about Er the Gobble-uns’ll git you, ef you don’t watch out! James Whitcomb Riley, who wrote the above embarrassing and disgusting verse, was, of course, voicing what was, in the 19th century, considered a very proper and creditable sentiment. (The poem came out in his Rhymes of Childhood in 1890.) It contains, as well, an ...”

“... exhortations, it cannot avoid falling prey to a certain didactic utility itself, just as Tom Jones tries paradoxically to teach us that virtue is for the most part spontaneous. Eighteenth-century satirists like Swift and Fielding commonly operate a kind of double optic, using some unworldly innocent to lay bare human degeneracy while deploying the fact ...”

“... Caesar may have intended by the words isn’t clear. Tempest cites ‘an important article’ by James Russell (1980) ‘that has often been overlooked’. Russell points out that the words kai su often appear on curse tablets, and suggests that Caesar’s putative last words were not ‘the emotional parting declaration of a betrayed man to one he had ...”

“... book is a magisterial study of a great popular artist: a full-scale interpretation of James Gillray’s output of satirical prints, and a biography that warrants comparison with the best ever done on an 18th-century artist. It has been furnished with gorgeous reproductions, along with close-ups that illuminate Gillray’s care for visual detail ...”

“... his company’s public repertoire at the Globe, received its first documented performance before James I’s court at Whitehall on 26 December 1606. It was then printed in 1608, as M. William Shak-speare, his True Chronicle History of the life and death of King LEAR and his three daughters, but even after spending fifteen years or more training and nerving ...”

“... early 1980s, Ismail Merchant set out to make The Deceivers. He was without his usual collaborator, James Ivory, who was not enthusiastic about the project. The film eventually appeared in 1988, and was met by a near unanimous lack of critical acclaim. The screenplay was based on a novel by John Masters (1914-83), who had served in the British army in India ...”

“... Sheerman demanding that Gordon stand down. Minutes later comes word that the pensions secretary, James Purnell, has resigned, leaving behind a message calling on Gordon to go. At least, unlike Hazel, he had the decency to wait until the election was over. How much more of this can we take? 5 June. Awoke to hear Paul Farrelly, the backbencher fingered by ...”

“... Orwell argues that murder is no longer what it used to be, and cites the 1944 case of Elizabeth Jones, an 18-year-old, and an American army deserter, Karl Hulten, who went on a killing spree together, known as the Cleft Chin Murders. They were a Bonnie and Clyde pair, a symptom of the brutality of war and of approaching modernity in dear old ...”

“... isn’t the person I married,’ and one doesn’t need to be unwell to feel what Henry James felt, writing to Rhoda Broughton in November 1915 after she had praised one of (what he called) his ‘old perpetrations’: ‘I think of it, the masterpiece in question, as the work of quite another person than myself, at this date – that of a rich (so ...”