“... about its ephemeral nature. We come across this in an imaginary conversation between Orwell and Jonathan Swift, an introductory talk to Arms and the Man largely concerned with Shaw the satirist and with whether his plays survive when the political battles are won, a piece on Wilde as social critic, and a ‘featurised’ version of ‘The Emperor’s ...”

“... acuteness of mind, as he ranges from Existentialist epistemology to the literary imagination of Jonathan Swift. Anderson’s examination of facets of Thompson’s historical technique – his notion of ‘No Class without Class Consciousness’, or his consistent defence of agency in history – is of importance to all schools of historian. The special ...”

“... Foot was an outstanding journalist. He wrote an academic work of distinction about the role of Jonathan Swift in the politics of his day, The Pen and the Sword. In the Fifties he became a top TV personality on, first, In the News and then Free Speech. In a passage which makes one cringe (for Foot, not for the authors) we read of how Beaverbrook ...”

“... no blockheaded aristo; he was an educated bon viveur, who had won the friendship and admiration of Jonathan Swift during his spell in Ireland as Lord Lieutenant. Swift said that at Christ Church, Oxford, ‘with a singularity scarce to be justified, he carried away more Greek, Latin and philosophy than properly became a ...”

“... books were not ‘good writing’, but more ‘a sort of pious journalism’, and he cites Jonathan Swift as holding a similar opinion. However, Baxter’s verses, in emulation of George Herbert’s, are still anthologised, read and even more frequently sung in churches. His ‘pious journalism’ about the class structure of the parties to the ...”

“... we learn of ‘the distinctive prose that Beckett, using French models in the main, though with Jonathan Swift whispering ghostly in his ear, was in the process of perfecting for himself, lyrical and mordant in equal measures’. And are told that Celan’s poem ‘Death Fugue’makes two huge implicit claims about what poetry in our time is, or should ...”

“... at the Folklore Society said Lang had jumbled up genuinely ancient tales with the work of Jonathan Swift and the French fabulists, whose fairies and giants were merely their own inventions. Yet this was a literary not a scientific venture, one less interested in curating immemorial fragments than in showing readers what it was like to think with ...”

“... and was a collaborative invention, dating from around 1714 and involving contributions from Jonathan Swift, John Gay, Arbuthnot and others. They contrived the persona in order to ridicule the follies and abuses of scholarship: Scriblerus is pedantic and myopic and, as The Dunciad expanded from three books to four, the apparatus occupied by his ...”

“... this list, according to a leaked report in the Sunday Times, H.E. Bates nestles side by side with Jonathan Swift, and Ted Hughes with Chaucer. A generation ago, Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia would probably have been selected; nowadays hardly anybody reads Lambs essays, although teachers nervous of starting on Shakespeare with 14-year-olds are urged to ...”

“... rhyme enemies or rats to death still excited the imagination of poets of the age of Ben Jonson or Swift. Sometimes the enemy destroyed was a rival poet, and perhaps this is what the tradition eventually narrowed down to. Jonson and more recently Roy Campbell are on record as threatening to destroy some fellow poets – in the latter case, better ones – who ...”

“... that makes me wonder how far such claims can be pressed. Septimus is very well read. ‘There was Swift too,’ Woolf noted in a draft of a scene in which Septimus reflects on the uncompromising ‘message’ he has found in the works of other writers who in his view have also seen through human hypocrisy and insincerity: Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare. ...”

“... believed a win would be good for the nation, the mind of Ireland freed, raw body, old head, albeit Swift died mad. The ‘Irish Salamis’ is a price you must pay for some victory over and above Pearse And Connolly and the ‘right rose tree’. It is, as he said, also ‘liable to bias’. The Queen at the wall in Ireland was not entirely unlike Willy ...”

“... achieves a miraculous release from his forty-year pre-adolescence and is made to undergo a swift, bruising rite of passage into adulthood. Hair sprouts on his chest, his voice breaks, he gets his first erection and to his own wide-eyed bewilderment finds himself in the midst of an awakening that is at once sexual, romantic and political. All of which ...”

“... at Luxor as ‘the bitter harvest of the last decade’. ‘It was like an earthquake: it was swift and devastating at the epicentre, but its economic and political aftershocks were longer and more pervasive.’ The terrorists ‘exposed the vulnerability of the state, the fragility of the economy and the soft underbelly of society’. As New Yorkers must ...”

“... a clock-like rhythm to this description of a daily routine, written by a man obsessed with time. Jonathan Richardson (1667-1745), the son of a London silk weaver, rose to prominence in the early decades of the 18th century as England’s leading art theorist and portraitist. Abandoning a career as a scrivener, he went on to paint writers ...”