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“... addicts – he has recourse to magical thought is that obsession and compulsion are his puppet-masters, twisting him unwillingly this way and that, forcing him to perform actions that can be justified only by recourse to esoteric motivation. In one bravura passage – and, however repugnant the underlying sentiments, he cannot be faulted for his ability to ...”

“... to promise a high-class thriller, though the 1970s setting suggests murky dealings – with John le Carré being thanked, under the non-pen name of David Cornwell, for ‘irresistible reminiscences’ – rather than any particular glamour. Serena Frome (the pronunciation of her name, Froom, poshly at odds with its spelling), both intelligent and ...”

“... standard study The Rise of the Novel (1957), while the title of A.D. McKillop’s The Early Masters of English Fiction (1956) speaks for itself. It was not until the rise of feminist scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s that Haywood’s importance was established, and even then Pope’s stereotype survived, though recast in approving tones. All the ...”

“... since Dryden.’ There is a report in a recently discovered manuscript by the poet and playwright John Hoadly of Fielding arriving at rehearsals incongruously decked out ‘in a compleat Suit of Black Velvet’ – the outfit for which Dryden was still remembered, and which the Dryden surrogate in Buckingham’s satire The Rehearsal traditionally wore. Like ...”

“... phrase – as an ‘emblem of empire to come’. Roe was, however, the diplomatic servant of two masters: he was James’s representative, but received his annual salary of £600 from the EIC, which barred him from involvement in commercial matters. The demand for his appointment had come from company factors in India such as William Biddulph, who in 1613 ...”

“... from the classical intellectual is in his lack of a vigorous public presence. George Eliot and John Stuart Mill moved in what could still be called a public sphere, which is less true of their modern counterparts. It was true, however, of the public seminars of the Parisian masters in the 1960s and 1970s, which were ...”

“... is why Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are read all over the world while Pushkin, despite the efforts of John Fennell, Antony Wood. DM. Thomas and Vladimir Nabokov, remains primarily a writer for readers of Russian. The myriad imperfections of rendering in any translation of a novel do not seriously impede what looks like genuine literary enjoyment: we weep for Anna ...”

“... absence of large voices, capable of negotiating the technical demands of the later 19th-century masters, not least that of meeting the resistance of a full symphony orchestra with vocal equanimity. Large does not only mean loud: it’s easy enough to sing loud, and plenty can and do. It also implies gravitas, stamina, and an organ-like ability to colour and ...”

“... It has been an influential cult novel: the Beats imitated its breathless style; Bob Dylan’s ‘Masters of War’ (1963) is clearly based on the tub-thumping final chapter. It was turned down by Hollywood studios 17 times, on the grounds that it was ‘too depressing’; Buñuel was set to direct it in 1965 but the funding collapsed. When Trumbo himself ...”

“... and competing political tendencies; between little Englanders (such as Richard Cobden and John Bright) on the one hand and chauvinist imperialists (such as Lord Palmerston and Joseph Chamberlain) on the other; between a maritime and peaceful trading nation and a military-imperial superpower; between a petit-bourgeois electorate, fired by the ...”

“... Montaigne. To the bonfire with William Hazlitt, closely followed by Max Beerbohm, Sainte-Beuve and John Aubrey. A brusque kiss-off to Francis Bacon, Charles Lamb, La Bruyère and the best of Mencken, not to mention Svetonius’s Lives of the Caesars; and into the garbage goes Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, perhaps the finest book of profile-essays ever ...”

“... public scandal is infinite.’ ‘By the common consent of all London’, Byron’s close friend John Cam Hobhouse said, Caroline had ‘made a dead set at him’. By the middle of May, Byron realised that he had been reckless; their affair had got out of hand. Besides, he hated scenes, and she could not live without them. In an affectionate letter he told ...”

“... against evils, and perhaps there is no easier business,’ Trollope said of the anti-slavery MP John Bright, a theatrical orator who couldn’t be bothered with political detail. Celebrating the Civil War as a triumph of freedom over slavery is equally easy. A few decades ago, US historians tried to complicate this heroic narrative. Guided at times by ...”

“... first part of this article comes from the journal. In addition to interviewing Victor Pasmore and John Piper, whose art he admires, although with qualifications, Fuller has interviewed Anthony Caro on his work for, and relationship with Henry Moore, although he believes that Caro has done great damage to British sculpture. In the fourth issue he prints Grey ...”

“... moment was perhaps the publication, while Skinner was an undergraduate, of a scholarly edition of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government by Peter Laslett. Laslett showed how radically Locke’s text had been misunderstood because of the ignorance of political scientists about, and their indifference to, the circumstances and aims of its ...”