“... conversion to co-operatives of conventional enterprises – the kinds of conversion introduced by John Lewis into his stores in 1929 and into Scott Bader in 1951 – and in the establishment of completely new co-operatives, a good deal more is possible than might be imagined. Although those who first have the idea and first ...”

“... the seconds left before touch-down, I resolved that I must exorcise my demon and fly again.Peter Scott started gliding the same year as me, and in Cambridge we used to say that the experience was reflected in the change that came over his wild-life paintings, the cardboard clouds of yesterday suddenly growing into beautiful living masses of cumulus. By 1963 ...”

“... claims into question.The modern​ appropriation of Phoenicia began in 16th-century Kent with John Foche, who was said to have ‘discovered’ that the first foreign visitors to Britain were the Phoenicians. Although Foche couldn’t know it, there is today one piece of evidence for a Phoenician presence on the British Isles, a tile excavated at Holt in ...”

“... Holyhead. The Company failed soon enough and Jones returned to writing, publishing two sub-Walter Scott epic poems, Corayda and Lord Lindsay, and most ambitiously, My Life, a verse novel cum autobiography which Taylor sees as having affinities with Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’. The main character is Jones’s idealised version of himself as the aristocrat ...”

“... with more than 50 per cent of the votes cast in their constituencies, 44 (including Tony Blair and John Prescott) were elected with over 70 per cent, and two with over 80 per cent. By contrast, only 14 Conservatives won more than 50 per cent of the votes cast. The most successful Conservative, John Major in ...”

“... Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), his influential study of elitism in 20th-century literature, John Carey writes about the ‘duplicity’ of Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel supposedly about love for the common man, but written in such a forbidding way that the common man is unlikely to read it. Well, The Lord of the Rings is the opposite. It is a work written ...”

“... modern jest book, which ascribed jokes and smart sayings to well-known figures such as the poet John Skelton or the fool Richard Tarleton. Jest-book-style anecdotes were often transcribed alongside more serious quotations in manuscript notebooks compiled by individual readers. So in 1601, the lawyer John Manningham ...”

“... Cry (a Moorcock favourite), through his love for his cousin Rosie and his spiky relationship with John Barbican Begg, developer and despoiler, global media tycoon. Revelations, betrayals, shifts of fortune, seductions, conspiracies, keep the fingers flicking over the pages. Dead on cue, after some cunningly weighted rhetorical passage, a jibe at ‘Pretty ...”

“... of the most prominent figures missing from Finkelstein and McCleery’s Reader, David Scott Kastan, has riffed on ‘New Criticism’, ‘New Historicism’ and ‘New Bibliography’ to dub his expertise the ‘New Boredom’.) The New Critics took ‘the poem itself’ where they found it, in cheap paperback reprints available even at ...”

“... in Notes and Queries for 1952, that the source for Browning’s ‘Cavalier Tunes’ was in Walter Scott’s Woodstock. And this raises the possibility – very unlikely, I think – that Pound drew directly on Scott without needing Browning as intermediary. However, Pound was a very bookish poet, as Browning was also. In ...”

“... Of those that remain, Joshua Reynolds, the Shakespearian scholar Malone and the politician John Courtenay are affectionate and supportive. These were the years, as we occasionally have to remind ourselves, when his Life of Johnson was completed, put to press, published, relished and extolled. This does less for him than might have been ...”

“... Between​ the wars, the journalist Richard Usborne recalled in 1953, there was a feeling that John Buchan was good for you. ‘If not exactly the author set for homework, Buchan was certainly strongly recommended to the schoolboy by parent, uncle, guardian, pastor and master,’ he wrote in Clubland Heroes, a study of the thrillers he had enjoyed as a child ...”

“... many of these powerful stories justify the comparisons made by his admirers: most pertinently, to John Cheever and Raymond Carver (Yates falls somewhere in between). But when Yates’s stories are encountered en masse – this new edition brings together his two collections and nine previously uncollected pieces – the uniformity of experience described ...”

“... of Fehling’s thesis of Herodotus the literary liar is widely detectable in recent work. John Marincola makes an intriguing case for Herodotus sometimes imitating the tall-story-telling of Odysseus, and expecting his audience, familiar since childhood with the Odyssey, to know when he was doing it. But this is to project on the past the sophisticated ...”

“... of the mission’. The sergeant Hollywood called up for this particular assignment was Ridley Scott, son of an army officer, who had by 2001 acquired a handy reputation for ‘getting difficult and novel adventure pictures done’. The US army provided the helicopters and a week or two of basic training for the cast.Thomson reckons it was Lewis ...”