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“... as an ancestor by the present generation of Northern Irish poets. You find him in collections like Frank Ormsby’s Poets from the North of Ireland, and poets like Derek Mahon and Michael Longley praise him. The praise doesn’t come because he wrote about Northern Ireland – there are a few fine Irish poems, but not many. No, MacNeice’s importance for ...”

“... which is mainly concerned with England, and such saints as Hugh of Lincoln, William of Norwich and Thomas of Canterbury, does not neglect the politics of canonisation, which has been the subject of several recent studies. Professor Gabrielle Spiegel, for example, has shown how the monks of St Denis and the kings of France collaborated to encourage the cult of ...”

“... actors and readers’, and the complicated webs of feeling set up among them. With Thomas Hardy, she concentrates largely on the Napoleonic Wars novel, The Trumpet Major, a work which she has elsewhere done much to raise in the canon. Dedicated to a company of Hardy’s fellow teachers at London University, this book seems to have grown out of ...”

“... subtitled ‘A Short History of Anglo-Irish Literature from S.T. Coleridge to Thomas Mann’) – McCormack’s contribution to Across a Roaring Hill, a collection of essays on ‘the Protestant imagination in modern Ireland’. In both these undertakings, the short and the long one, McCormack shows a salutary urge to acknowledge all the ...”

“... in hushed tones of his own encounter with a ghost, we treat the story as evidence of just how ‘frank’ our friend is being rather than as prima facie evidence that he is fibbing. But if such distortions of judgment are the consequences of belief, where does that belief begin? I think it begins with the fear of being seen to be an unbeliever. In a culture ...”

“... Some weeks ago Sir Isaiah Berlin gave a broadcast in which he described his first visit to the legendary Russian poet Anna Akhmatova in Moscow in 1945 – a visit cut short in its prime by the bellowing of Randolph Churchill in the courtyard outside, hotly pursued by the Russian Secret Police. Alas, such humorous anecdotes will not be found by Berlin devotees in his latest book, Washington Despatches ...”

“... to discover a Marxist such as Philip Corrigan belatedly finding much to approve in G.R. Elton on Thomas Cromwell, or J.H. Plumb on Walpole. Whether Elton or Plumb would be pleased about the use he makes of them is another matter: Anderson, by the way, has a highly penetrating assessment of Walpole as Thompson’s bug-in-chief. So what special insights have ...”

“... who might with reason feel a sense of grievance at Davis’s historiographical bugaboo is Frank McGregor, whose unpublished thesis on the Rangers (Oxford, 1968) has been pillaged by David wholesale, yet who gave to him the most interesting part of his case. For McGregor, in several articles, has himself developed the argument that George Fox and ...”

“... secret, missing truth. In less paranoid ages ignorance may just be ignorance. Underworld , like Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon , is in this sense a post-paranoid novel. When one of DeLillo’s characters thinks of ‘the paranoid élite’, we are meant to catch the friendly irony, the flicker of nostalgia. These are people who believe that the first ...”

“... an effect: that of what Barthes calls ‘festivity’. Two years after Barthes’s death, Chantal Thomas wrote very well of ‘the persistence of a theoretical desire progressively liberated from a concern with seriousness or consequence’. Does that sound frivolous? The concept of theoretical desire suggests a project that might be urgent, as well as ...”

“... and in some cases certainly do, construe this as overhearing a distinctive poetic voice.’ So Frank O’Hara addresses a leaf: ‘Leaf! You are so big!/How can you change your/colour, then just fall!’ and John Ashbery talks to a fictional reader who is not there: ‘Why do I tell you these things?/You are not even here!’ These fictional addresses to ...”

“... Nazi years as a form of ‘inner emigration’. This was a postwar concept used by the novelist Frank Thiess, who stayed in Germany under Hitler and published a number of officially approved books. Thiess was responding to a broadcast by Thomas Mann (who spent the period in exile in America) in which he said that everyone ...”

“... the appropriate Galenic text. That tradition – or much of it – has been revived in books by Frank Gonzalez-Crussi, a professor of pathology in the Children’s Memorial Hospital at Northwestern University, who has created a subgenre of his own: portrayals of the usual and the monstrous drawn from his own professional life, with a bookish veneer that ...”

“... abstraction and idealism.’ To this end, Nelson contrasts the different ways in which Guest and Frank O’Hara compare words to rocks. O’Hara’s poem ‘Today’ giddily lists: Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! You really are beautiful! Pearls, harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all the stuff they’ve always talked about still makes a poem a ...”

“... leaps, arriving for instance at Eliot’s thoughts on farming via the pottery of Bernard Leach and Thomas Hennell’s 1939 drawings of discarded scythes and harrows for H.J. Massingham’s Country Relics. These are threaded together by a historian’s fascination with how the past conceived its own past. How did 1930s sensibilities, from John Betjeman to Cecil ...”