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“... work hitherto much less influential than the very early (and prodigious) Seven Types of Ambiguity. Christopher Norris comes right out and calls Complex Words ‘a work of deconstruction’. His collection is meant to demonstrate that Empson can be accommodated in modern theory. It can now be shown that he was in many ways anticipating the interests and ...”

“... the masses what the masses need.In their attempt to understand today’s post-democratic politics, Christopher Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti note overlooked commonalities between technocracy and populism which, they argue, allow for an unlikely synthesis between the two. Both involve the replacement of an old elite, one that is seen as technically ...”

“... that’s the articulate part, and the mass, the proletariat, is a great senile toothless hairless white ape, blind, tied, etcetera.’ America, where he was happy with Plath, he describes as ‘glazed’, ‘boundless suburbia’, ‘plastic cellophane’. He is severe on Larkin, saying of his prose miscellany, Required Writing, that ‘the whole book’s ...”

“... He let the Victorian values down gently. As the values blur, the topiary comes sharply into focus: white hair cascading in patriarchal fashion, beards trimmed and buffed into the emblematic shape of a utensil (spades, mostly) or an armament (Samuel Butler has a ‘torpedo beard of silver grey’). These are hairstyles with attitude. Butler’s torpedo beard is ...”

“... with appeals to colour-blind communism and pan-Africanism. As Robert Vitalis notes in his book White World Order, Black Power Politics, Black Internationalism was born alongside the white chauvinist version of international relations at the end of the 19th century, when ‘international relations meant race ...”

“... political and criminal possibilities providing the principal subject of plays as diverse as Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II (1592), Ben Jonson’s Sejanus, His Fall (1603-5), Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1626) and John Ford’s Love’s Sacrifice (1632). According to Perry, this is in large part because the favourite made conveniently visible ...”

“... the Rolling Stones who summoned Dionysus and Pan, with their none hipper retinue: Kenneth Anger, Christopher Gibbs, Gram Parsons, Jean-Luc Godard. The Beatles grew sheepdog hair and Bakunin beards, and adopted the statutory exotic guru, but they never really had anything like the Stones’ sullen, dandified grandeur. The Stones were exquisites; the Beatles ...”

“... never leave, I began to keep a diary of what it felt like to be there in the days of its snowy white disintegration, which felt also like the disintegration of my own mind. My interest was not academic. I did not care about the Singularity, or the rise of the machines, or the afterlife of being uploaded into the cloud. I cared about the feeling that my ...”

“... on a lot filled with flawless Christmas trees for sale, lit by strings of lights hung from red and white candy-striped poles. The camera swoops on a family of five, husband, wife and three children, arranged in perfect descending height order from left to right, husband Henry to little Bobby. The shot is framed by two trees; in the upper right corner, a group ...”

“... these prodigious gatherings, the poetry looks svelte. Yet the 2015 Faber edition of the Poems by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue itself runs to nearly two thousand densely annotated pages. This, too, is a breathtaking achievement. Very few people will read through all these thousands of pages, and their publication risks making Eliot seem more daunting than ...”

“... for we have only to recall Derrida’s elaborate readings of Kafka, Geoffrey Hartman’s of Christopher Smart, or Barbara Johnson’s of Zora Neale Hurston, to see how much analysis of text and modification of the canon have gone into deconstructive theorising. But why should Steiner, who wants to replace commentary with ‘performance answering ...”

“... lofting into the air – but I don’t see them in the poem. When Les Murray writes, ‘the white-faced heron hides in the drain with her spear,’ or when Allen Curnow writes, ‘the small wind instruments in the herons’ throats / play an incorrigible music,’ there is in each case the shock of something quite particular, and of language forced to ...”

“... publishing his dead daughter’s diary. In a schools’ version (Otto Frank’s version, edited by Christopher Martin) published by Longman’s to commemorate the first national Anne Frank Day on 12 June 1996, the inside front cover states: ‘By thinking about Anne Frank and her message to the world, it is hoped that the day will enhance young people’s ...”

“... than the evening air/Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars’), I was reminded of Christopher Ricks saying twenty years ago, in an article about the sexual revolution of the Sixties, that he was against the whole thing on the grounds that the new free-for-all was unfair to plain women. (What about plain men? Are women pleased to get any old ...”

“... directly to the law of war being undermined. A year ago, the American Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, put his first-class legal brain to work trying to re-interpret the 1948 Genocide Convention in order to extricate the US Government from its clear duty ‘to prevent and punish the crime of genocide’ in Rwanda. The State Department directed its ...”