“... to become residuals (and hence very difficult to relate to anything real). Solow and Temin are frank: ‘The usual routine, in the absence of anything better, is to treat technology as the ultimate residual ... This is particularly unsatisfying to the historian.’ So it is that many historians, while finding the national income aggregative approach ...”

“... arguments finally break out and break down. BS501 (and PS501 too) await their textbook writers. Frank Kermode’s masterguides are not such men. As Leach, for instance, explains, he is not offering stock answers to any stock questions. Indeed, he warns, anyone who read him for this would be put down by most examiners as ...”

“... because, like Robinson Crusoe, he’s fiction that’s become myth. ‘Fictions,’ according to Frank Kermode, ‘can degenerate into myths whenever they are not consciously held to be fictive.’ The fictiveness of Sherlock Holmes was uncertain from the start. The letters addressed to him sent to Conan Doyle for redirection, the landladies who wanted to ...”

“... ran the headline in the Wiltshire Herald and Advertiser. His school reports are amusing: ‘frank and responsive, full of good will’; ‘a little unpopular with the other boys, who regard him as rather boastful and self-important’; ‘I much admired his fighting spirit in the boxing’ (here too, perhaps, the dandy’s liking for a ...”

“... been the glory of classical art – was one of the big issues of those days, and the artist-critic Robert Smithson had great fun with Fried’s finding that certain polychrome sculptures by the painter Jules Olitski consisted of surfaces that had the miraculous property of being ‘flat, but rolled’. Speaking of the American painters he championed in the ...”

“... several times, as ‘a boxer’. No, no. Muhammad Ali was a boxer, Sonny Liston was a boxer, even Frank Bruno was a boxer: Alvarez boxed. Despite all this bluster and beefing about, Alvarez puts one in mind not so much of a reckless slugger and controversialist like Norman Mailer, as of a more genteel tradition of eccentric but robust writing; of a writer ...”

“... leader to complain about the ‘strange dishes’ which weren’t ‘up to English standards’. Frank Forsdick and his men asked for ‘a bit of old English roast beef or a plate of fish and chips’ and beer instead of wine. It didn’t require the commercial vapidities of the Greenwich Dome – a Festival of Britain manqué – to reveal that such ...”

“... Anatomy of Bibliomania, a comprehensive treatment of obsessive book-buying in the manner of Robert Burton; and sometimes even a copy of Carter and Pollard’s Inquiry into the Nature of Certain 19th-Century Pamphlets, the exposé that dished Thomas J. Wise, forger of rare editions. It all seemed to contradict the rants of intellectuals about the ...”

“... Vendler to distort major figures helps her discriminate among lesser planets. Her inclusion of Robert Hayden, for example, is bold and welcome. Moreover, her promise to present writers ‘whole’ has more chance of being fulfilled with subsidiary figures. When Eliot judged anthologies less just to major than minor poets, he was, as often, lending his ...”

“... In the 1964 film Robin and the Seven Hoods, when someone compares ‘Robbo’ (Frank Sinatra) to Robin Hood, one of the gangsters asks: ‘Who’s Robin Hood?’ And another replies: ‘Well, he was a hood, some Englishman who lived long ago and had an operation going for him in the forest. And I guess the "robin” means he stole birds ...”

“... McCarthy and facing dissent in his party, he became convinced he wasn’t going to win. Then Robert F. Kennedy, one of three main Democratic contenders (alongside McCarthy and the vice president, Hubert Humphrey), was assassinated, only two months after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. The former governor of Alabama George Wallace ran a ferocious ...”

“... more crazy if we were to have more casualties on our side to save the Japanese. This is quoted in Robert Kee’s 1945 – The World We Fought For. Kee’s method is to construct an account of the year from contemporary newspapers and journals. Its vice is that it can look rather lazily tacked together. Its virtue is that it helps us to see events as the ...”

“... and has been followed by Mark Thornton Burnett’s edition of the plays for Everyman in 1999, and Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey’s for Penguin in 2003; the first Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe appeared last month (edited by Patrick Cheney).* Even without the bloodshed and intrigue that the fatal stab wound in ...”

“... the Memoirs as a remarkable hybrid: as innovatively mock heroic as the Dunciad; as winningly frank and ramblingly anecdotal as the autobiography of her patron, the comic actor and poet laureate Colley Cibber; as dizzying in its inversion of perspective as Gulliver’s Travels; and as sentimental as the novels of Samuel Richardson, a patron for whom ...”

“... declared, quoting Pasternak. Here she distinguished herself from her contemporaries: poets like Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer and Paul Blackburn often harked back to fraternal tropes of the knight, troubadour, jongleur. Never king. Guest’s origins were anything but kingly: born in North Carolina in 1920, she was shuffled around from town to town in ...”