“... traced. Fielding, who outraged the critics by plundering contemporary jestbooks, included in Tom Jones the anecdote of a felon mocked from the bench with malevolent puns about hanging, which goes back to a Jacobean source, which attributes it in turn to a 15th-century jester, the possibly apocryphal John Scogin. Yet Dickie also insists that 18th-century ...”

“... states.The most original group of essays here – Asanga Welikala on conservatism; Emily Jones on liberalism; Stephen Sedley on socialism; James Mitchell and Alan Convery on unionism; and Michael Keating on nationalism – deal with the ways political ideologies interact with the constitution. Sedley points to ...”

“... so by her mastery of the context, brilliantly recreating Dora’s milieu – sometimes out of Tom Jones, sometimes from Vanity Fair – in which royalty and politicians mixed with actors and actresses, in a fin de siècle atmosphere heavy with assignation, infidelity, betrayal and revolution. In part she does so by her characteristically skilled control of ...”

“... we not rub ourselves with grease and ashes we would not last long.’ We’re not far here from James Fenimore Cooper’s linguistic register in The Last of the Mohicans (‘Are the Hurons dogs, to bear this? Who shall say to the wife of Menowgua that the fishes have his scalp, and that his nation have not taken revenge?’). When Mali’s son Theotiste ...”

“... In a discussion​ of literary brothers Theroux mentions not just Thomas and Heinrich Mann and James and Stanislaus Joyce but Vidia and Shiva Naipaul, ‘both of whom I’d known’. At this moment the notional Jay Justus completely disappears within Paul Theroux, who had a famous if not enduring friendship with V.S. Naipaul, and whose unforgiving book on ...”

“... are more confident still. Shakespeare’s recent biographers Park Honan and Katherine Duncan-Jones take it for granted that the play was his. Andrew Gurr, in editing Richard II, ‘assumes’ that it was, and the same assumption is made by the editors of the Oxford Complete Works of Shakespeare and the editor of the new Arden edition of the play. Leeds ...”

“... Tristan und Isolde suggests: ‘Öd’ und leer das Meer’ (‘Desolate and empty the sea’). James Miller was the first critic inspired by Peter’s speculations and the appearance of the drafts to attempt a thorough outing of Eliot. His T.S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land (1977) offered ‘new interpretations’ of much of Eliot’s early work, and found ...”

“... strike of 1972. One Cymdeithas member involved in supporting the strike told King that Siân James, who later became Labour MP for Swansea East, was ‘a housewife at the time, and the strike galvanised her, and she became another person: she became emancipated by the strike.’But James tells her own story to King. In ...”

“... and in France were shared by Paris, Versailles, Lyons, Marseilles and Bordeaux. So, as Henry James explained, ‘one has not the alternative of speaking of London as a whole, for the simple reason that there is no whole of it ... Rather, it is a collection of many wholes, and of which of them is one to speak?’ Which, indeed? One matter which ...”

“... school, funding came from Social Services. Regular guests at their parties included the actor James Robertson Justice, who was one of Britain’s leading film stars in the 1940s and 1950s and reportedly a close friend of the Duke of Edinburgh. Princesses Marina and Alexandra are said to have attended. Among the former Duncroft girls to have come ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... front-liners who actually lived through or died in that ‘abyss of blood and darkness’ (Henry James). In one of his most telling sequences, Fussell reported on a visit to the Somme. Finding it, in the early Seventies, ‘a peaceful but sullen place, un-forgetting and unforgiving’, he tried to conjure some picture of what it might have been like, day by ...”

“... of inspiring an afterlife that has come to include Glastonbury, ley-lines, Monty Python, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and a thriving industry of occult bookshops. It was Chrétien who first realised that the legendary history of Arthur, largely invented by Geoffrey of Monmouth a few decades earlier, allowed huge scope for making up adventures for his ...”

“... of whether or not BP smoothed Aliyev’s ascent to power is ‘a bit of a red herring’, says James Marriott of the campaign organisation Platform, co-author with Mika Minio-Paluello of The Oil Road (2012), the authoritative account of the company’s dealings in Azerbaijan. ‘The important point is how BP helped form a state that would assist in meeting ...”

“... a direct relationship carried through by regular and active correspondence, or face to face. LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) argued out the first US publications, The Newly Fallen and Hands Up!; Tom Raworth, in England, another reliable card and letter-writer, delivered From Gloucester Out. In other words, poets published poets, signalling their affinities ...”