“... hybrid in culture. It is no accident that he started on a postgraduate thesis at Oxford on Henry James, hardly the most congenial of topics for an English literary leftist, but with an obvious appeal for a student of intercultural relations. His suspicion of fully-fledged systems is also, ironically enough, characteristically English. The most obviously ...”

“... the house behind them, a miserable hut of miscellaneous logs and tarpaper. But the art historian James Curtis has shown that the reality was much less desperate. There was no dust storm: Rothstein couldn’t have shot the picture if there had been, and besides, the horizon is clearly visible. The building was a disused shack, not the family house, which can ...”

“... With his trusty snorkel, he stakes out the whole of watery England for his Grail quest. Like D.H. Lawrence, Deakin is happy, in the end, to remain mystified by the secret of that invigorating power. He quotes Lawrence’s poem ‘The Third Thing’: Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a third ...”

“... young artists, architects and critics (including Richard Hamilton, Peter and Alison Smithson, and Lawrence Alloway, among others) who developed, from within the Modernist Institute of Contemporary Art, a Pop sensibility of their own. His revised dissertation, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, made his scholarly reputation in 1960; thereafter Banham ...”

“... Tailor – ‘a device so simple that it left him genuinely elated by its symmetry’. Clive James, writing in 1977, had similar feelings about the ‘symmetrical economy’ of The Spy who Came in from the Cold (1963). ‘It could,’ he said, ‘be turned into an opera.’ Le Carré – that is, David Cornwell, an ex-spy – once said that he entered ...”

“... Human Abstract’. The Vassar archives hold references to many other writers and critics – Henry James, Hart Crane, as well as notes on modern art and scattered thoughts on narrative – that don’t make it into Quinn’s edition, and it would have been good to know more about her selection criteria. Small quarrels aside, Quinn’s notes constitute a ...”

“... one further meeting. Just after the opening of An Ideal Husband to great notices (though Henry James hated it), Wilde bumps into Conan Doyle and asks him if he’s seen the play. Conan Doyle hasn’t. Wilde said with a grave face: ‘Ah you must go. It is wonderful. It is genius!’ And Conan Doyle thinks he’s gone mad. He’s never seen swanking on this ...”

“... Report of 1955 is cited for its ‘chilling’ prose. President Eisenhower had commissioned James Doolittle to evaluate CIA operations. His Report, as the Church Commission notes, can be read as a brief for future CIA operations. It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at ...”

“... Romantics at the far end, going through some aspects of Arnold and Ruskin, to Pater, Yeats and Lawrence, Graves, elements of Eliot and Woolf, and down to Leavis, Dylan Thomas and then, coming towards the nearer end of the line, the dark, odd and uncouth figure of Ted Hughes. In the superb doorstop of his Collected Poems, Hughes comes across as a more ...”

“... have been right.’ Russell will compare Ship Money to the Poll Tax, and describe the arrival of James I in London as a foretaste of the Single European Act. Such are the playful flourishes of a scholarly ascendancy. In these pages Blair Worden has even ventured the view (LRB, 29 August 1991) that Russell’s ‘hegemony’ over Civil War studies has ...”

“... fathers of the novel ... Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett and Lawrence [sic] Sterne; generosity indeed to double the number!’ A list so nakedly daft obviates detailed scrutiny. It may be worth asking how Lever (born 1806) contrived to predate Jane Austen. If Spender wants to double her number, extensive independent ...”

“... live, no more than that: a stopover. How did William Burroughs finish up in a clapboard cabin in Lawrence, Kansas, with his brood of sleek, well-fed felines? The old man mumbled something unconvincing about property prices. Why did the quintessentially English Michael Moorcock nominate the second Confederate governor of Texas’s mansion in Bastrop, thirty ...”

“... in archives to find out how the popes piped fresh water to their city and sewage away from it.* Lawrence Principe and William Newman (Alchemy Tried in the Fire, 2002) and Pamela Smith (The Making and Knowing Project) have decrypted arcane manuscripts and recreated forgotten crafts to establish how alchemists and artisans actually did their work, which they ...”

“... Bates, W.H. Davies, L.P. Hartley. Yet early reviews compared Coppard to Hardy, Kipling and D.H. Lawrence, and he was acclaimed by (among others) Ford Madox Ford, Malcolm Cowley and, later, Doris Lessing. Though his most productive decade was the 1920s, and he was well enough known by 1931 for a bibliography of his work to be published (with interjections ...”

“... the conventions of academic debate. After a polemical first chapter, mauling those who, like Lawrence Stone, reject Freud while larding their text with inaccurate analytic terms, Gay retraces the founder’s career, inviting historians to follow him all the way from dream-theory to group psychology. Most apologists, alarmed by Freud’s dismissal of ...”