“... of Modern Art in New York has started to issue a series called Studies in Modern Art, edited by John Elderfield (who was born in Middlesbrough and is another veteran of the Conceptualist/Modernist art school battles of circa 1970). The first of them, American Art of the 1960s, contains seven essays and is like a heavily illustrated, hardback academic ...”

“... too. Greetings, borrowers. What I admire – not the word – about the poems is their intensity. John Berryman once said: write as short as you can, in order, of what matters. Surely no one – least of all Berryman himself – can have fulfilled the terms of that prescription as scrupulously as Hamilton. The majority of the poems are generated by one of two ...”

“... shows a preference for the poetic abstracted from vulgar congregational performance – he likes John Byrom and Christopher Smart, whose greatest successes, as Davie sees it, were not pointed towards the actual singing of current congregations. Some poems which have been highly successful as sung works in congregations – of the past and sometimes of the ...”

“... ourselves too seriously. But for all the wisecracking, Fussell is right to quote also, as he does, John Adams in 1805: ‘The rewards ... in this life are esteem and admiration of others – the punishments are neglect and contempt.’ Or as John Locke had put it already, ‘the principal spring from which the actions of men ...”

“... Dr Faustus at this time, especially its passages on Hell – and Music.’ (When?) It is all John of the Cross, Nietzsche, Eliot, John Donne, Leibniz, Kant and, of course, music. The determination to exaggerate leads to two dreadful things: the reader, irony of all ironies, starts to disbelieve the writer. And ...”

“... credit for what comes out of his laboratory. The Nobel Prize for the discovery of insulin went to John Macleod and Frederick Banting, whereas it was Banting and Charles Best who did the critical experiments, and James Collip who extracted the insulin; Macleod was the lab chief. Since even scientists themselves have difficulty in accurately assigning credit ...”

“... fragment’, as another character observes) is this rich and dense account of a life rendered. As John Bainbridge sifts through his rag-bag of memories, we close in on the events and people and things that have nearly touched him nearly: the death of a young subaltern in the war, an adulterous affair with his sister-in-law and with many others, a painting, an ...”

“... to perfecting the process of political competition and representation – see, for example, John Hart Ely’s Democracy and Distrust. Judicial activism in the interest of protecting substantive rights not required (or previously decided) by the political process itself would, on this view, be undemocratic. It would be undemocratic because it would ...”

“... 23 months, yet in March when the tremendous blow strikes, the news that somehow or other, while in John Stuart Mill’s care, his just finished first volume, which pleased him ‘better than anything’ he had ever done, had been used as kindling, he and Jane respond without bitterness and with total courage to the emergency. As Carlyle sets out to write a new ...”

“... her earlier life. He knows her handsome brother Jeremy, currently up at Magdalen. His best friend, John ‘Pimlico’ Price, a manufacturer of sweets, is an acquaintance of her former lover, Geoffrey. Theo seems to go out of his way to throw Evelyn and Price together. It emerges that Jeremy is bisexual, and has been Price’s lover. Evelyn herself, in freakish ...”

“... metal than Gilbert. His Perseus, Icarus and Eros, and the works by Pomeroy, Frampton or Goscombe John of a similar character, are exercises in the precarious balance, slender support, open pose, complex silhouette and brittle projection which are either impossible to achieve, or ineffective if achieved, in stone. What of the narrative element in sculpture ...”

“... attractive, formidable people in Nigerian writing (and indeed in tales by Rider Haggard and John Buchan), but books from white-settler territory, by such authors as Athol Fugard or J.M. Coetzee, seem to present them as permanently morose, deformed in body and soul, to be pitied from a great height. I exaggerate, but Donald Bloch’s morbid novel ...”

“... publicists like G.H. Lewes or G.J. Holyoake, or even established writers like Carlyle or John Stuart Mill, had limited means and little patronage. But most new arrivals found that their heroism on the barricades or their daring escapes meant nothing: ‘these people’, wrote Amalie Struve from ‘the gloomy banks of the Thames’, ‘do not know our ...”

“... inventive faculty is always glad of a reality-principle, no matter how earthy or matter-of-fact. (John Ashbery’s poem, ‘My Erotic Double’, is an interesting variant of this theme.) The Death of the Body ends with a telegram informing Uta of the fate of two of the characters – and it is striking how little we suddenly find we care about any of ...”

“... One of the most revealing sentences in God’s Instruments comes in the penultimate essay on ‘John Milton: Life and Writing’, where Worden suggests that ‘among the main themes of Milton’s writing before 1649, one subject is conspicuous by its absence: politics.’ This of a man who, over the previous decade, had written in support of the freedom of ...”