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“... mark is all over this novel, not just in the muscular, shouldering prose style – the style of John Self – but in Ripley’s rich tangle of adolescent preoccupations, his Charles Highway-like obsession with bodily products (‘matutinal lungbung’ in particular), with his own appearance (‘My tasty eyes ... Much is the womanly bullshit that has been ...”

“... by all the other literature-soaked rhetorics currently available. A neat chapter on the explorer John Charles Frémont serves to make a similar point: Fender shows Frémont moving between picturesque modes of writing and scientific recording – ‘sometimes the oscillation between the two modes is nervously rapid’ (‘nervous’ – what else!). There is ...”

“... in the rock-leaved Bible of geology’. Those were the words of the pioneering geologist John Wesley Powell, who led the first expedition through the Grand Canyon in 1873. Thomas Moran, an experienced painter from Philadelphia, travelled with Powell, and had been to Wyoming and Montana with the US Geological and Geographical Survey two years ...”

“... in The Devil upon Two Sticks; and – his best-loved creation – mob-capped and shawled as Mrs Cole in The Minor. This prototypical pantomime dame was also a topical skit on a Covent Garden brothel-keeper, ‘Mother Douglas’, whose recent conversion to Methodism provided the kind of ready-made comedy of modern manners on which he thrived. All these were ...”

“... Davies’s book trundles slowly through the birth and marriage of Stobart’s grandfather John and his father’s business beginnings (lime-spreading). We learn how many Saturdays young Edward spent spreading slag and how much cash he liked to keep in his pocket and how much profit Eddie Stobart Ltd made in its first year. There are four pages on the ...”

“... over her own want of presence of mind’, and we sense the denial of feelings hidden from herself. John Wiltshire’s finely observed study of Jane Austen’s six completed novels is all about the way she conjures characters’ hidden feelings. His title might lead you to expect some revelation of Austen’s private passions but, while knowledgable about her ...”

“... to the left of the liberals he had already invited – his suggestions included Orwell, G.D.H. Cole and Herbert Read. If Hayek wanted to unite individualist humanitarians against the collectivist threat, Popper advised, he must extend an olive branch to the defenders of interventionism: those who wanted to cure society’s ills by increasing social ...”

“... the Webbs showed the way, but among the founding fathers of the craft, R. H. Tawney and G.D.H. Cole made distinctive contributions to the study of the culture and institutions of working people. Activists’ history, though, inevitably offers a positive invitation to revisionism, for the question arises as to whether partisan historians can distinguish ...”

“... the pornographic lyrics to the Beatles’ second hit, ‘Please Please Me’. (What she made of Cole Porter’s 1934 ‘You’re the Top’ isn’t on record.) When she wrote in the brochure of the Clean Up TV Campaign that she spoke for ‘the ordinary women of Britain’ and ‘ordinary housewives’, I knew exactly what and who she meant. They were the ...”

“... B. Priestley, G. Wilson Knight, George Steiner, Angus Wilson) have been booming the name of John Cowper Powys for many years, outraged that other big guns will not join the salute. In the first number of the Powys Review, in 1977, George Steiner blamed Dr Leavis for praising Theodore Francis Powys above ...”

“... of lyrics, Goddard is the culmination of all his rock ’n’ roll predecessors – Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Bruce Springsteen – as well as what’s best in funk, soul, reggae – and, of course, the influence of such master saloon singers as Nat King Cole and ...”

“... then canonical English Social History, or in the work of such socialist historians as G.D.H. Cole and Raymond Postgate, even though they were writing ‘what they declared to be the history of the common people of England’. How could they leave out ‘the best known Englishman of his time’? They could leave him out because the place of sport in the ...”

“... their families to the coast. The inspiration behind the scheme was George Lansbury, the subject of John Shepherd’s biography, a book as meticulous as it is generous. It is nonetheless timely: just as the prison service has brown-filled this pleasant site, so, too, New Labour has trampled on the radical socialism of which Lansbury was one of the finest ...”

“... that would escalate through the attacks on US embassies in Africa and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen to the conflagration in New York nine years later. What eventually tipped bin Laden towards war against America, when he had seemed so close to settling into a bucolic idyll in Sudan? As background, Wright offers the sense among the jihadis that ...”

“... for the godly in England. In 1629 he became active in the Massachusetts Bay Company headed by John Winthrop, a Suffolk man. A year later Pynchon and his family boarded the Ambrose, one of Winthrop’s fleet of four ships that sailed for the New World, where there was known to be land for the taking. Pynchon settled seven miles south of Boston, near ...”