“... writing; a not untypical example: ‘around the mid-19th century when dialect emerged’. Daniel Rosenberg on Home Tooke makes interesting connections back to Locke and forward to de Man but neglects Bentham. Roy Porter on the language of sickness in Georgian England could usefully have been longer and G.S. Rousseau on late 18th-century nerves could just as ...”

“... cartoons of today’. Its pivotal event was the electrocution of the atom spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The British edition of Gerald’s Party, Coover’s latest novel, comes larded with tributes from Angela Carter and Malcolm Bradbury, both of whom insist on its canonical status. Coover is ‘a master’, says Carter, and according to Bradbury he is ...”

“... sentiments necessarily impose themselves on particular writers. I recall a fine remark by Harold Rosenberg, that if a man is in a given situation, it doesn’t follow that his conscious will be there with him. But it would be wrong to run to the other extreme and claim that a writer is totally unconstrained in his images and motifs. A valid history of ideas ...”

“... as ‘a bohemian rebellion against established society which came to prominence about 1956’; David Ignatow’s poetic idiom as ‘Brooklynese speech’. But at least it doesn’t pretend to be more than it is – a ‘companion’, not a history. I wish I could say the same for the season’s lot of general surveys, which look so authoritative to the ...”

“... or ‘one’ for ‘I’, wouldn’t make the needful point. In Looking at Giacometti, David Sylvester records a similar – though far more articulated – face-off with one of Giacometti’s lean and vertical female figures. And the effect here is not simply one of identification: I feel within my muscles the stance of the figure, feel I am ...”

“... writing his only history of science. It is still more surprising that it should come from David Wootton, an early modern intellectual historian whose 1983 study of Paolo Sarpi, a late Renaissance theologian, concluded by cautioning historians not to act as a ‘jury’. There are two stories folded into Wootton’s Bad Medicine: one concerns the ...”

“... the war doesn’t figure all that much in Graves’s early poetry. While Owen and Sassoon and Rosenberg found their styles transformed by the need to register the overwhelming horror and pity of the trenches, Graves seems to have felt poetry and war in some measure antithetical. Only a couple, such as ‘A Dead Boche’ (‘he scowled and stank/With ...”

“... Baltimore has been to crime what 19th-century London was to poverty. This is due in large part to David Simon, once a Baltimore Sun reporter himself, whose books Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner City Neighbourhood (written with Ed Burns) were both turned into TV programmes, and fed into his most successful ...”

“... You​ ought to be in a kindergarten,’ a Canadian nurse exclaimed to David Jones, aged twenty, awaiting transfer home in July 1916 after being wounded in Mametz Wood. Even a decade later, photographs show a wary child or an understudy for an adult. Prudence Pelham, the staunchest of his extended female fellowship, described him as ‘completely unsexed ...”

“... appeared on the stage.’ Moorcroft Wilson – who has written biographies of Edward Thomas, Isaac Rosenberg and Sassoon – has a carefully forensic style, and tends to rely on remarks by Graves’s contemporaries to convey his character. She has such a store of these that one does get from the book a sense of what a fusion of confusions he was: his friend ...”

“... impede what was going to happen. He seems to have explained to others the horror to come. Alfred Rosenberg, charged in April by the Führer with the ‘central direction of questions of the east European area’, minuted to himself: ‘What I do not want to write down today, but will never forget.’ No direct, unambiguous order, however, has been ...”

“... self-expression (the alternative account of Abstract Expressionism put forward by Harold Rosenberg) to painting as a surface where external signs are impressed. Where Rauschenberg played ‘in the gap between … art and life’, a motto that suited his rambunctious personality, the taciturn Johns waited for the world to come on to him, metabolising ...”

“... back to that of the First; and it’s true that Keith Douglas was always conscious of Isaac Rosenberg behind his shoulder, Alun Lewis of Edward Thomas. But the idea of modern warfare as one thing and of poetic response to it as another seems, in retrospect, almost Churchillian in its fixedness. Back then, although we loved the old rogue for the ...”

“... as well. While Himmler put up a monument to the Saxon dead, Hitler forbade his chief ideologue, Rosenberg, from calling ‘a hero’ like Charles the Great ‘the butcher of the Saxons’, adding that ‘without violence, no one either in Charles’s times or in ours could have brought together the German peoples with their thick heads and their ...”