“... novels and six volumes of collected short stories, he is an industrious translator of the likes of John Irving, Raymond Carver, Tim O’Brien and Scott Fitzgerald. Once the owner of a jazz bar who only had time to write in the small hours, he is now such a cult figure that there are even translations of his novels, complete ...”

“... near-homophonous Alistair MacNeill; two of his screenplays had already been turned into novels by John Denis; and a third screenplay is undergoing similar treatment by Simon Gandolfi. In this curious world there are occasional legal hiccups. One such, not so much a hiccup as a cardiac arrest, recently befell HarperCollins when they were prosecuted and heavily ...”

“... this deadpan claim to literary originality: Swift lifted these words from the Restoration poet Sir John Denham’s praise of Abraham Cowley: ‘To him no author was unknown,/Yet what he wrote was all his own.’ As it happens, it was Cowley’s rhapsodic style Swift began his career by imitating, so that (he bragged to a cousin in 1692) ‘when I writt what ...”

“... history, which extended citizenship and basic legal rights to blacks, overturning the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision of 1857 which had insisted that only white persons could be citizens of the United States. Johnson vetoed both bills. This was the start of an increasingly acrimonious conflict with Congress, in which, Wineapple writes, Johnson ...”

“... make women? At 19 she was close to suicide, but found strength to go on from reading Emerson and John Stuart Mill. These are her own landmarks, ‘disconnected but indelibly printed in the mind’. At 20, she began to write The Story of an African Farm. If she had been the child of an English Evangelical parsonage, she would have been conforming, in her ...”

“... of the press organs in that difficult period, was supported from time to time by the Government. John Walter II, no longer having that support, switched into opposition in 1820 and supported Queen Caroline against George IV. Whether or not his motives were disinterested, his sales more than doubled. There is nothing like sexual scandal and public passion to ...”

“... There are less unexpected points in the other essays and it is a pity that one of them claims John Knox as the father of Scottish Presbyterianism, and another contrasts ‘history’ with ‘herstory’. Points can be made without insulting the English language. From Glasgow Presbytery in 1960 comes a remark on women’s ordination: ‘every religion ...”

“... poem associated with Rochester, ‘Upon Nothing’. One is written in the hand of his steward, John Cary, the other in a scribal hand. The second has been meticulously corrected from the first by Lady Rochester, who does not however correct the ascription of three stanzas of the poem to ‘Dux Bucks’ and three more to ‘Fleetwood Shepherd’. Harold ...”

“... for a London publisher during a brief inter-war return to his homeland; Sir Ernest Scott edited a more substantial conspectus as a volume of the Cambridge History of the British Empire (1933). It was only with the expansion of the university system after the Second World War that Australian history began to be studied and taught in any ...”

“... the hardshell godmother of punk was without honour in her own country. She simply wasn’t there. John Lydon (formerly Rotten) was up on the hoardings, three layers back, advertising butter. Thatcher was a historic footnote in a culture that had abolished history. Or a tethered spectre in the form of a flapping black crow. Determined to squeeze a few last ...”

“... Muggletonians was, notably, Christopher Hill, who found significant links between these people and John Milton, as they drank and argued in the London pubs of the 1650s. For Hill and Thompson these were ‘radicals’, political as well as religious activists, part of Hill’s World Turned Upside Down. A vertical history of the subject could not at that time ...”

“... I can do to stop this, listen, listen, it is coming it is coming it is co Notes by Dr Frances Scott Director of Acute Inpatient Mental Health Services, Maudsley Hospital The preceding document was found on the desk of a 58-year-old man, Professor Merritt Watkins, who is now a patient in my care. The professor had undergone a psychotic break while ...”

“... revolted by that book, and American intellectuals have never put him beside Faulkner, Hemingway or Scott Fitzgerald. And on the Continent there is no translation of Waugh as audacious as Avanti Jeeves.And yet even those who praise him nearly always begin by dissociating themselves from what they regard as his bigotry, his snobbery, his cruelty, his infatuation ...”

“... of our stage!’ His climactic description was elaborated in the Second Folio (1632) by the young John Milton: ‘Thou, in our wonder and astonishment/Hast built thyself a lasting monument.’ Historically, Shakespeare criticism begins with wonder, and that it should have returned there in these millennial times ought not to surprise us. This batch of studies ...”

“... of Desert Island Discs’ ten best episodes. Many included Yoko Ono on being hated and witnessing John Lennon’s murder, the actor Stephen Graham on his suicide attempt, Maya Angelou on childhood trauma, Simon Cowell boasting, Alfred Wainwright on his last walk in the Lakes as his eyes failed (‘the mountains wept for me that day’) and Tom Hanks moved to ...”