“... can, into fantasy. He has some sympathy with the familiar constipation-theory, made so much of in John Osborne’s chronicle-play. ‘Luther’s scatology-permeated language has to be taken seriously as an expression of the painful battle fought body and soul against the Adversary.’ It may be worthwhile to recall that shit is nearly as plentiful in Marx’s ...”

“... here, in more senses than one, that the author’s problems begin. The Macmillan family apparently took against the book that he was writing and has withheld or withdrawn permission for him to quote from copyright material over which it has control. The present Earl of Stockton is quoted as calling the author’s technique ‘psycho-history’, which ...”

“... discontent back into a wide-ranging critique of the received version of the past. Initially this took the form of a patricidal assault on the radical nationalists who were arraigned for their mythologisation of the convicts as defiant victims, the bushrangers as primitive rebels and goldfield diggers as levelling democrats. The re-evaluation widened as ...”

“... prestige rested. No wonder he was looked on as a threat to vested interests by his colleagues. It took a long time for the French to be impressed by his masterpiece on the Mediterranean. He published it at his own expense; it remained out of print for many years. Only when an English translation appeared, and was greeted enthusiastically abroad, did the ...”

“... The action spans fifteen years, from the end of the Depression to the advent of Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles. Vidal keeps track of the major political developments but concentrates on the inter-generational conflicts between Burden and Blaise and their respective children. From time to time a famous politician appears in the middle distance – we ...”

“... changing rapidly and competition for housing was intense, serious inter-racial hostility mainly took the form of what Pilkington calls the ‘white riot’. The same thing is referred to in some of the relevant American literature as a ‘communal’ or ‘contested-area riot’ – the Chicago riot of 1919 offers one of the most spectacular ...”

“... Hillis Miller, in his book, The Disappearance of God, which was published in 1963, before Miller took his deconstructionist turn. The critical avant-garde was at that moment phenomenological, in the manner of Gaston Poulet; the critical project was to map the configurations and repetitions of an entire oeuvre, including marginal materials, journal entries ...”

“... names of bogus universities, jokes and obscenities. The author mentions the way in which designers took to applying their labels all over their garments, like graffiti gangs registering their ‘tags’, but does not speculate on why the human race has felt irresistibly drawn to providing such a miscellany of reading-matter on chest and back. Is it part of the ...”

“... without aeroplanes or electricity, to a time and a place where a trip across the Atlantic that took only five days was a projector’s fantasy. Do we regret or celebrate their passing? Do we applaud or bewail the new speed and laxity? Which is the age of innocence, then or now? The movie doesn’t attend to the passage of time in this way – it leaves ...”

“... resourceful magpie of a ship-owner who disposed of his fleet at the outbreak of World War One and took to collecting everything from Chinese pottery through armour to French Impressionists. There were reproductions of his library, dining-room and lounge. ‘Lounge’ is perhaps not quite the right word: upright uncomfortable chairs, hideous panelling, deep ...”

“... novel had been wholly dire in their presentation of warfare since the Napoleonic Wars. Linklater took a middling position. In one of his autobiographies, Fanfare for a Tin Hat (1970), he wrote regarding his own Private Angelo: ‘War, in Italy, was a drunken, destructive and impertinent clown; to deal justly and truthfully with it, one had to keep one’s ...”

“... of ‘Good old Toyners’: later he was fined a pound by the Party. The Cambridge of John Cornford would have regarded such frivolity as monstrous.) He was consistently irresponsible and enjoyed, rather than feared, the thunderbolts that followed. In Brussels in 1945 he used to dress up as a padre in battle-dress and dog-collar: but Miss Mitford ...”

“... discovered that Republican and Democratic acceptance speeches of the Sixties and Seventies took different approaches to ‘sovereignty’. Republicans stressed the ultimate authority of God, which they implicitly separated from the authority of the people. The Democrats were more likely to bring the two together, stressing the sovereignty of the people ...”

“... Priapeville, Bordelopolis, Voluptopolis. There is possibly a touch more wit in the wry name that John Camden Hotten, who laboured in the dubious sector of the London book trade, gave to a series of reprints he published in the 1870s: the ‘Library Illustrative of Social Progress’. Another example of Victorian erotica, The Pearl, A Journal of Facetiae ...”

“... run out and that’s that. Yes, that was Boycott’s finest innings yet: Those fifteen runs that took three days to get. Boycott was born to give the Wisden bores The perfect subject for their lucubrations. He is the average oaf whose average scores Are averaged out in their long computations, Reducing you to helpless yawns and snores. Like small boys ...”