“... Whisper’) and shopped it around to record labels, but ‘Wham Rap!’s message clashed with the post-Falklands mood of triumphant Thatcherite aspiration.Only Innervision, a start-up label backed by CBS Records, would take a chance on Wham! (the name of the label evokes Stevie Wonder’s 1973 album). It was good timing: Michael’s father – never an ...”

“... for out-of-body bliss. Can I carry off the decadence of it? With all those memories of rusty post-industrial rivulets, municipal chlorine tanks, filled-in lidos of a lifetime stretching back through the polio-defying 1950s to coal-dusted Bristol Channel beaches still being cleared of barbed wire and mines. There is no resistance in the Shangri-La ...”

“... to do with actual genealogical practice. Norman Rockwell’s 1959 cover for the Saturday Evening Post, Family Tree, has at the top of the tree an impeccably white baby – not surprising – one far whiter than might be expected from the swarthy and often disreputable ancestry sprouting up from the roots: at the bottom, a pirate is matched with a Spanish ...”

“... from Guatemala to Hungary, Serbia to Switzerland. One act has branched out into its own ‘post-break up’ solo Beatle tribute acts; another, from Brazil, is set to open its own Cavern Club in São Paolo. Beatles tourism belongs to the post-1990s world of arts-led ‘regeneration’ and site-specific ...”

“... of something more basic: the article’s price. For all the talk lately about the emergence of a post-industrial economy – in which ‘information’ or ‘services’ are displacing the authority of any single material resource – the last few years have been an object lesson in just how vital to capitalist dreams of the future the control of a few ...”

“... In some places, especially cities, this is the case even now, to the extent that the phrase ‘post-gay’ is slowly becoming current. Therefore, how we read the past, and read into the past, and judge the past are likely to become matters of more open debate. The temptation to make anachronistic judgments and ask anachronistic questions is hard to ...”

“... to share generic features with its more popular cousins, but it doesn’t; Cormac McCarthy and Jonathan Lethem are not of the same genre as Philip K. Dick, however long Margaret Atwood managed to ‘pass’. Indeed, the solution may actually be a rather simple one, namely that modernism is not a genre, while SF emphatically is – and this opens up ...”

“... every week. Religious revivals prove temporary. The people of Florence soon wearied of Savonarola. Jonathan Edwards, preaching God’s wrath in the 1730s in my home town of Northampton, Massachusetts, brought his congregation to paroxysms of weeping, despair and repentance, but after the ‘great awakening’ had spread through the region and made him ...”

“... at the enemies of the Party on the telescreen. Would Orwell have secretly been delighted by the post-Orwellian sadism of Big Brother the TV series? He certainly understood how groupthink could fuse with sadistic appetites to generate entertainment. But although the Two Minutes Hate in the bath is the kind of thing most people do (or so I want to ...”

“... far too much going on as a stand-alone track, never mind a multi-part suite.There’s a strain of post-LSD pop on SMiLE, epitomised by ‘Vega-Tables’, ‘Do You Like Worms’ and ‘I Love to Say Da Da’, that is more rictus than goofy grin. As with the solo work of Syd Barrett, the whimsy can be charming, but can just as easily make you wince. A sunny ...”

“... writer. So if Rick Moody tells us that Lydia Davis is ‘the best prose stylist in America’, and Jonathan Franzen that ‘few writers now working make the words on the page matter more,’ does this make her better or worse equipped to render the best prose stylist of 19th-century France into 21st-century American English? Davis’s stories, typically from ...”

“... nourishment for writers who seek it out, make it their own, and use it to create something new.Jonathan Bate’s​ How the Classics Made Shakespeare has more modest goals. Bate grants that Shakespeare’s classical influences have often been studied before, but claims that ‘certain aspects of Shakespeare’s classical inheritance have been curiously ...”

“... German strategy, was Harry Hinsley. After the war, Hinsley returned to Cambridge as a don. Post-war Cambridge was dominated in the humanities, not so much by Leavis, as by Butterfield and Oakeshott, who had founded the Cambridge Journal. Through his famous criticism of rationalism in politics, Oakeshott there questioned the assumptions, motives and ...”

“... as Roark (Rand was delighted: Cooper was famously right-wing) and Patricia Neal as Dominique. Jonathan Romney, reviewing a 1998 re-release, admired the ‘monumentalist oppressiveness’ of the art direction, then remarked on how strange it was to see the noble Gary Cooper professing not the usual love-of-the-little-fellow tosh, but the joys of the ...”

“... International Review, who like her supposed fictional avatar had been dismissed from a teaching post because of her German heritage (Kilman is an anglicised version of Kiehlman). But there is, I think, another candidate, one who arrived on the scene at precisely the moment when Woolf was beginning to think that ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’, in which ...”