“... from his time as a student at the Slade, where he studied under Henry Tonks, befriended Augustus John and was chucked out after a few months for poor attendance; they show him to be a talented and restrained draughtsman. Eight years later, having flirted with the idea of becoming a poet, he turned to primitivism: Anthony (1909) is a monolithic head on a ...”

“... Bronx. O’Brien is one of a long line of hicks from upstate who made their way to the big city. John Ashbery, whose work O’Brien disapproved of (‘the poetry of programmatic inconsequence’), had arrived in NYC 15 years earlier, from a farm near Lake Ontario. Many of O’Brien’s poems could be characterised as pastoral. This is ‘East Branch’: a ...”

“... Seine                        DUBONNETThe Scarlet Woman shouting BYRRH and deafeningSt John at Patmos                        Vous descendez Madame?   QUI SOUVENT SE PESE BIEN SE CONNAIT   QUI BIEN SE CONNAIT BIEN SE PORTE                        CONCORDEToday’s reader has no difficulty decoding the fragmented style and ...”

“... accessible only to those whose gender and class supposedly made them invulnerable to corruption. John Woodroffe (1865-1936) was typical of Britons with a penchant for Tantra: by day a judge on the Calcutta High Court, renowned for his severity, he was by night an ardent Tantrika, publishing translations and introductions under the pseudonym ‘Arthur ...”

“... numerous telephone calls; various literary tie-ups, Hardy and Eliot, Milton and Coleridge, John Cheever and Adrienne Rich, all load-bearing and well-worked; the ministrations of a professional psychologist (‘On a scale of one to ten?’) and those of a well-intentioned amateur (‘She shuts her eyes, as if to meditate. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck,” she ...”

“... there no Marxism in Great Britain?’ and those of the essay (co-authored with Colin Matthew and John Kay) on the effects of the enlargement of the franchise after 1918 on the Labour Party’s share of the vote. If, as McKibbin believes but other historians and psephologists dispute, the enlargement of the electorate did significantly help the Labour ...”

“... Jane Miller, who quotes this as one of the ‘views which men need women to have’, cites John Stuart Mill with equal pertinence: ‘We are perpetually told that women are better than men, by those who are totally opposed to treating them as if they were as good.’ She admires Clarissa for its seductive subtlety and humour, and to what degree ...”

“... he was always a storyteller for boys, in the tradition (a very good one) of R.L. Stevenson and John Buchan. In A Sort of Life, which was as near to an autobiography as he was ever prepared to go (and itself the result of psychotherapy for a period of writer’ block), Greene tells how he first came to keep a record of his dreams. Though it’ not at all ...”

“... led her to put such effort into paring herself down to the bone – as in the line from a poem by John Hewitt: ‘A tree is truer for its being bare.’ However, when it comes to her ‘recalling’ a rape by a motorcycle gang, even Josie concedes that it may have all been in her head: ‘A common fantasy among young women, so I’m told.’ What did happen ...”

“... has benefited greatly from the attentions of the Hull-based magazine Bête Noire. In the past year John Osborne, the magazine’s editor, has published a hundred of the poems now included in Goodstone, and it is very much thanks to this exposure that Voss has secured a mainstream British publisher. In Osborne’s estimation Voss addresses factory experience ...”

“... This prevalent lack of confidence and the starry-eyed attitude towards Europe are summed up by Mrs John Sherwood in 1884 in Manners and Social Usages: ‘There is no country where there are so many people asking what “is proper to do” ... as in ... the United States of America. The newness of our country is perpetually renewed by the sudden making of ...”

“... Babbage down to size. His candidate for the Presidency of the Royal Society, the great astronomer John Herschel, was defeated by the Duke of Sussex, whose main qualification was being the King’s brother. Technical education was left at the mercy of private patronage; Babbage failed to win a seat in the reformed Parliament; and Melbourne cut off funding for ...”

“... organiser of Women’s Institutes and Country Women’s Organisations, and a decorous affair with John Pentland, grandson of Lord Aberdeen: ‘I can’t give him all with abandon and urgent desire.’ A hundred and fifty pages of schoolgirlish sentiments and solemnities (‘work is the only only only remedy for life’) is more than enough, and it is a relief ...”

“... all windy ideals in that it is eminently attainable and totally practicable. Going out, says Mr John Knightley, is unnatural behaviour ‘in defiance of the voice of nature, which tells man, in every thing given to his view or his feelings, to stay at home himself, and keep all under shelter that he can’. I try, as I read, to put into my voice the settled ...”

“... that had hung in his nursery, he meets Queen Victoria, seated on a piebald pony and attended by John Brown. (The expedition’s ponies had suffered atrociously.) ‘ “Happy Birthday,” sang the man holding the bridle. And oh, how warm it was.’ This may strike us as well over the top, uncharacteristic of the author, an afterglow from Peter Pan. Yet it ...”