“... of happy minorities into a more perfect whole.’ That The Golden Age takes several swipes at Frank Capra should come as no surprise. In the volumes written before Vidal had conceived the sequence as a whole, the demands of history and imagination are for the most part equally addressed. Though the central fictional character of Burr, the ...”

“... the ground for the 18th-century Enlightenment through their intellectual adventurousness and their frank admiration for the societies they met in India, China and Japan. They lacked in these countries the military backing of European powers that laid waste to the civilisations of the Americas (and the even more devastating effect of European diseases did not ...”

“... by Irish Dynamiters.’Eighteen months earlier, a young Irishman recently returned from America, Thomas J. Clarke, one of O’Donovan Rossa’s Sancho Panzas, had been arrested in London. Using evidence of an elaborate bomb factory in Birmingham, the Crown charged him and other followers of O’Donovan Rossa with treason. (The plan, it seems, had been to ...”

“... rather memorably, wandering the hills, ‘each irradiating each’. He also knew John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle and Benjamin Jowett, the master of Balliol, who – Taylor said, again memorably – was ‘nervous and still, deeply learned, a silent reservoir with a gleam’. Taylor’s daughter Una later wrote Guests and Memories: Annals of a Seaside ...”

“... the quest of her final book.) What other things made up Fitzgerald’s ‘burden’? Well, Frank Kermode was right early on, in this paper (22 November 1979), when he noticed the fascination with water, in its many forms and depredations: damp, flood, rain, drowning, ‘the dead man’s stench of river water’, the ‘long-awaited torrents’ that ...”

“... encomium spoken by Flecknoe, a prolific poet here figured as ‘monarch’ of ‘nonsense’, to Thomas Shadwell, the rival of Dryden who was later to take his place as poet laureate, but who is here represented as Flecknoe’s heir: Shadwell alone, of all my sons, is he Who stands confirmed in full stupidity. Just as in the lines to Howard, it is one ...”

“... of me that likes to serve the people. In a different era, I’d have liked to have worked with Thomas Paine.’ A pretty infallible rule of rock thumb is: anyone brandishing the word ‘people’ (there was also her 1988 song, ‘People Have the Power’) no longer considers themselves one of the people, and probably hasn’t for some time. Smith has ...”

“... Until the 17th century this country remained, in this respect, on the fringe of Europe. Then Thomas Gataker, who turned down the Mastership of Trinity, practised critical scholarship in his commentary on Marcus Aurelius, and John Pearson, an eminent theologian, who was successively Master of Jesus, Master of Trinity and Bishop of Chester, displayed it in ...”

“... sky behind him, a painting long believed to be a portrait of Dr Johnson’s beloved black servant, Frank Barber. Houdon’s radiant patinated plaster head of a black woman of 1781, probably made in connection with a fountain group for an aristocrat’s garden, is another. Above all, there is the Portrait d’une Négresse exhibited at the Paris salon in 1800 ...”

“... discontinuities between technical discourses, Foucault’s work was often found compatible with Thomas Kuhn’s accounts of paradigm shifts in the natural sciences. Foucault writes a history of the way various disciplines for acquiring knowledge evolved, but he avoids the ‘Whiggish’ assumption of the necessary superiority of later theories, especially ...”

“... why Austen readers could find her thoroughly disturbing. Jane Austen and her contemporaries had a frank curiosity about one another’s personalities and lives which often at the time came under fire as vulgar prying. A passion for gossip at all levels made the early 19th century an age of biography, and flowed into other literary forms in abundance, taking ...”

“... time he is making a notable contribution to English poetic style, and it is unfortunate that D.M. Thomas’s shoddy translations of Pushkin and Akhmatova should have received more attention. Leopold Staff, who died in 1957, was one of the founding fathers of modern Polish literature and his sophisticated simplicity won the admiration of Milosz, Rozewicz and ...”

“... starkly minimal. It’s a bit like trying not to miss the earthy, textured solidity of Chaucer, or Thomas Wyatt, when you read Petrarch: you have to learn not to want that particular localised moonlit wood. It’s just ‘the wood’. In fact Leopardi was writing out of an intense attachment to the landscape around his home in Recanati, in the Marche, 15 miles ...”

“... Lee Harvey Oswald, who looked nothing like the potential presidential assassins played by Frank Sinatra (in Suddenly) or Laurence Harvey (in The Manchurian Candidate), slid ticketless into the Texas Theatre in Dallas, for a double bill that would otherwise have drifted beyond record: Cry of Battle, set in the Philippines, and War is Hell!, a Korean ...”

“... others’, and read now mainly for Beckett’s contribution. The other essays are by Marcel Brion, Frank Budgen, Stuart Gilbert, Eugene Jolas, Victor Llona, Robert McAlmon, Thomas McGreevy, Elliot Paul, John Rodker, Robert Sage and William Carlos Williams, and there are two ‘letters of protest’, the second written in a ...”