“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... like the warehouse on the previous page here, it is part of a fine series of photographs by Robert Morrow). Davis is at his best on the arsenal of repressive techniques designed to keep the have-nots at bay or under control, from the architecture of Frank Gehry to the geosynchronous spy satellite and other high-tech ...”

“... The first wounds James’s extreme sensitivity to criticism and parody. She brings him Frank Colby’s jocular 1904 piece, which says that James’s novels are so bloodless that the adultery in them can’t corrupt anyone, and expects him, apparently, to enjoy it. Its patronising tone makes evident why ‘his ever-bubbling sense of fun failed him ...”

“... again he repeats the charge of prudery and cowardice, each time with a more damning tone. ‘When Frank Manuel suggested that Newton may not have been primarily heterosexual, the Newtonian establishment attacked him as if he had uttered the unthinkable.’ Isaac Kramnick was ‘savaged’ for broaching the subject of Burke’s homosexuality. Wilmarth Lewis ...”

“... on two antitheses which he does not appear to recognise: the contrast between Belfast and what Frank Wright calls the ‘unreformable’ decaying border areas, and between Ulster as the last representative of a British tradition and the rest of Britain which has, in the eyes of very many Protestants, betrayed it. The Ulster state was never a monolithic ...”

“... the world of business whether they want to or not, and the connection is eerily alive in Frank Sinatra’s version of ‘Mack the Knife’, where he sings of making an offer you can’t refuse. There is almost too much to unravel here. The song comes from (the English translation of) Brecht’s re-creation of Gay’s play, and has been separately ...”

“... Flaubert’s letters are in truth the best of their century in French, a wonderfully frank, powerful and animated compendium of his moods, his attitudes and his ideas concerning the practice of his art. Why would Proust go out of his way to condemn them, if not to warn his own posterity that a great writer may (or must?) write second-rate ...”

“... He drew the line, too, at Hitler’s 1936 speeches attacking the Bolsheviks and the Jews, telling Frank Dobo that even a ‘Jew-baiter’ like himself couldn’t ‘swallow such drivel’. What emerges from these half-serious and contradictory asides is a sense of Miller’s overwhelming political naivety. He seemed genuinely to think that his genius extended ...”

“... for the office, clearly knowing when he was licked. You couldn’t hope to out-dress old Frankie-Frank Spellman, one of the great bitch drag queens of this or any other age. Nobody should grudge the frumpish Hoover a fling or two, or indeed a flounce, though probably with his figure and complexion the stockings were a mistake. (Didn’t he have one kind ...”