“... a national body of verse. When she does mention Scottish anthologists, editors and publishers – John Bell (The Poets of Great Britain), Robert Anderson (Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain) and Thomas Campbell (Specimens of the British Poets) – Bucknell doesn’t comment on the way they promoted through their works’ titles a ...”

“... are lyrics everyone knows, but not ones Sondheim can hear without squirming. He went to Williams College in Massachusetts and acted a little: the part he craved was the young killer in Emlyn Williams’s Night Must Fall. He had to smoke for that role, and continued for decades. After graduating in 1950, he studied ...”

“... or Scottish privateers. Most of them worked as servants in London or in southern port towns. John Blanke was a trumpeter who performed at court. In 1509 he was present at the funeral of Henry VII and performed at Henry VIII’s coronation. Two years later he performed in the celebrations heralding the birth of Prince Henry, the longed-for son of Henry ...”

“... Even the souls of the dead will be destroyed. Cordus’ approach is unorthodox, but Gareth Williams has described Seneca as providing in his writing a ‘cosmic viewpoint’ that emphasises our ‘minuscule place’ in the universe. Cordus reveals that he has found a new perspective. Instead of standing up for his right to free expression, he considers ...”

“... result – a horse-drawn harvester set off against a silver sea – over half a page. Clough Williams-Ellis stretched Tyneham’s view of Worbarrow Bay over the end-papers of his passionately-argued conservationist volume Britain and the Beast. There could scarcely have been a more evocative picture of an England that, in the Thirties, was endangered but ...”

“... even more productive of academic recognition, it has stirred a controversy about editorial method: John Worthen, one of the three editors of the Cambridge Women in Love, describes his approach in D.H. Lawrence in the Modern World and defends it in Essays in Criticism (April 1989). Yet, as H.M. Daleski points out in the same collection, Joyce has effectively ...”

“... he was Jewish. In those days your friends didn’t resign over such a thing. He met Jenifer Williams, the beautiful, outspoken, politically and sexually radical daughter of a diplomat, and amid the tangle of her relations with other men – jealousy being strictly forbidden – they gradually became engaged, and were married in 1941. Before their ...”

“... name of a fictional spy? Why couldn’t Fleming have used another pair of common monosyllables – John Clark, say? Bond is a solid, blue-chip, faith-giving kind of a name. Who wouldn’t prefer a government Bond under their mattress (we’re talking AAA British) to a petty clerk? Is your word your clerk? I don’t think so. Bond. It’s in the name. More than ...”

“... like Wilson and Blair – by not being about anything.The prominent British political theorist John Gray has also been seen as chameleonic. His passage from Mill to Hayek to Berlin (he has written books on each of them) has prompted charges of swaying with the wind or, still less charitably, being a Vicar of Bray. The Hayek phase coincided with ...”

“... commissioned a comprehensive survey of refugee movements. To superintend the project, it appointed John Hope Simpson, a persuasive and highly energetic man who had worked in India and Palestine, directed National Food Relief policy in China and served as vice-president of the Refugee Settlement Commission in Athens. Simpson’s mainstay in France was ...”

“... a narrow line between cynicism and credulity. There are thinkers like Jürgen Habermas, Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson who can be too positive about ordinary human capabilities, and others like Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou and the later Frankfurt School who are a good deal too sceptical of them. This is​ a bold book, not least because Felski must ...”

“... through the reductionist lenses of colour and colourlessness. She leans heavily on Raymond Williams’s notion of a ‘structure of feeling’ which supposedly defines the ‘particular and characteristic colour of a period’. What Williams intended by ‘colour’ was ever-changing mood, constant only in its ...”

“... to read the reviews aloud. ‘It is to be hoped that she will be recognised for what she is,’ John Ashbery wrote in the New York Times, ‘one of the finest modern writers of fiction, in any language.’ He went on to describe her prose as ‘a constant miracle’ in which ‘it is impossible to deduce the end of a sentence from its beginning, or a ...”

“... had written Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge and All My Sons, Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie, Streetcar, Camino Real and The Rose Tattoo, but if Osborne shows any American influence it is from the earlier generation of O’Neill, or even Odets. There were intermittently fine productions on the London stage: ‘revivals’ of ...”

“... his Presidential years. ‘To lunch at the Wyatts at Connock. Clarissa Eden, the Weinstocks and John Harris ... the Weinstocks and Clarissa all being surprisingly agreeable.’ ‘Drive to Isleworth and dinner with the Gilmours ... an enjoyable and interesting dinner.’ But if these were sometimes occasions for tittle-tattle and of no great interest ...”