“... was bestowed still the greatest honour that could have come my way.15 February. Good reviews for Richard Wilson’s production of Sarah Kane’s Blasted at Sheffield. In such a violent play, though, I find myself spiked by my literalness (as I remember being by Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking). If a character is mutilated on stage, blinded, say, or ...”

“... are the Wrong Notebooks. The same could be said of the Diaries of Emma published in facsimile by Richard Taylor, and containing memoranda of four holidays the Hardys took abroad, starting with their honeymoon. When Emma died in 1912 Hardy read not only the haunting Some Recollections describing her childhood and the Cornish romance with her husband but what ...”

“... with government – over minimum standards for all council housing. And although I see that both Richard Haslam and Jonah Jones credit him with authorship of the splendidly rude, punchy, near-libellous DIA Cautionary Guide to St Alban’s (1929), I am surprised that some credit doesn’t also go to what is surely the echo of that same ...”

“... In 1979, in a preface to a new edition of Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann wrote about 46 Palmerston Road in Rathmines in Dublin, where George Yeats lived between her husband’s death in 1939 and her own death almost thirty years later. Mrs Yeats lived, Ellmann wrote, among the dead poet’s papers. ‘There in the bookcases was his working library, often heavily annotated, and in cabinets and file cases were all his manuscripts, arranged with care … She was very good at turning up at once some early draft of a poem or play or prose work, or a letter Yeats had received or written ...”

“... the commanding officer in Vietnam, was asking for 206,000 more troops. Neil Sheehan and Hedrick Smith reported this leak, which was accurate and had a devastating effect on Congress and the American people. It did not come from Ellsberg, but ‘as I observed the effect of this leak,’ he recalls, ‘it was as if clouds had suddenly opened. I realised ...”

“... the Washington watchdog apparatus, it grew more exacting in its attentions. An FBI report on Mr Smith Goes to Washington now called it ‘decidedly Socialist in nature’, while It’s a Wonderful Life was ‘an obvious attempt to discredit bankers’. The first of the three invasions of Hollywood by HUAC came in 1947, the others in 1951 and 1953. On every ...”

“... of scooter-borne rock fans, draped in the ambiguous insignia of RAF targets and Union Jacks. What Richard Weight calls the ‘very British style’ of Mod found its initial foothold in late 1950s Soho with the arrival of the jazz ‘modernists’, who defined themselves in strict opposition to the reigning gatekeepers of Trad. Modernists were wilfully ...”

“... will to literature received its fullest critical acknowledgment in the period between Richard Ellmann’s 1959 biography of Joyce and Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971). Kenner’s book, based in part on interviews with Pound, presents itself as a parting glimpse of an age of demi-gods. It marvellously exhibits, by a vivid survey of ...”

“... Mellor and Gerald Kaufman (described by Isaacs as possessing ‘toxic conceitedness’) to Chris Smith were not amused. How, people asked, was the ‘income requirement’ of the Arts Council’s most voracious client arrived at? Were the singers’ fees not excessive, did the stage crews not live the life of Riley? A succession of investigations by ...”

“... and state expenditure.’ No doubt Keynes needed the Treasury View in the same way that Adam Smith needed the Mercantile System: as a received theoretical account of an erroneous prevalent practice, to be coherently expounded as a preliminary to its comprehensive refutation. But to dismiss it as a construct seems hard on Keynes when his adumbration of ...”

“... unravel mentally and physically. Starting out as a stereotypical man of action, Terrier resembles Richard Stark’s protagonist Parker, whose qualities Manchette listed in his diary: ‘L’insensibilité, la brutalité, l’obstination, la capacité professionnelle, la force. Parker est un sauvage.’ His emotions range from tensing his lips to grunting. His ...”

“... Pinocchio that it is Collodi’s original that has come to seem like the revised version. As Richard Wunderlich and Thomas Morrissey write in their study of Pinocchio in America, ‘Pinocchio’ Goes Postmodern (2002), Collodi’s novel is now merely a ‘version among versions’: an adult version in their view, unsuitable for children, because no ...”

“... story, Plath arrives at Cambridge immaculate, with her gold and white Samsonite luggage, her neat Smith College clothes, her shiny freshly-washed blond hair. And England drags her under, dirties her, releases the true poetic self, which is ‘aggressive, rude ... disorderly, sexual’. In death she is ‘the little defeated American girl’, Malcolm writes ...”

“... was sent a bomb in a hollowed-out book called Ice Brothers; another of his victims, Edward John Smith, had the same name as the captain of the Titanic. Kaczynski believed that the ship of modern technology was heading for an iceberg. Foster thinks that a close study of this evidence might have helped the authorities home in on Kaczynski earlier than they ...”

“... to embark on another round. In their introduction to Emma in the Cambridge edition of the novels, Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan argue that Austen wrote for the rereader. In Emma she deliberately sacrificed ‘readability’ for the sake of a novel that ‘demanded repeated rereadings’. Wiltshire cites their argument that Emma, more than any other of ...”