“... Maynard Keynes was probably the most influential thinker that Britain has produced, at least since John Stuart Mill, and in addition he exhibited a variety of talents and achievements which together amounted to genius. Wherever 20th-century English literature is discussed, whether in America or elsewhere, Virginia Woolf’s novels and voluminous other writings ...”

“... arrogance had not tempered readers’ adulation. While she herself has written a biography of John Dos Passos as well as books on Ellen Glasgow, Plath and Stein, Wagner-Martin does not discuss any differences in her own approach to male and female writers, or consider the possibility of sexual blind spots in the work of women writing about men. Clearly ...”

“... through and through, because it is our own invention, or rather the invention of Alan Turing and John von Neumann. The now famous Universal Turing Machine was an imaginary device that could rearrange any row of l’s and 0’s in accordance with any finite set of rules supplied to it; the von Neumann computer is its electronic incarnation, whether as a BBC ...”

“... rather who, he has modified: among poets, Whitman, Frost and Stevens; among critics and theorists, John Hollander, Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell, George Kateb, Richard Rorty and Sacvan Bercovitch. Strong claims are made for the validity of the Emersonian position – it represents ‘what literature is most often trying to tell us about itself and how it wants ...”

“... I thought I had best begin by expressing some old-buffer prejudices in general,’ Empson told the British Society of Aesthetics in 1961: ‘but now I will turn to English Literature, which it is my business to know about, and try to examine the fundamentals, the basic tools.’ As he turns to literature, he shelves the old-buffer prejudices and begins to display instead the rationalism which spoke habitually of the ‘basic tools’ of imagination, and the sensitivity to language which enabled him to examine and test those tools ...”

“... climate. He recalls one night when the American audience bowed their heads in silence after John Proctor’s execution: the Rosenbergs had simultaneously been executed in Sing Sing. He is both amused and appalled at the film trailer with which a Hollywood film company tries to neutralise Salesman (a cheery succession of businessmen dismissing Willy ...”

“... rather than attempt to exhume a real hero of their own. They thought they could finish off poor John Stuart Mill, but they never succeeded, except in their own estimation. Now, however, we are faced with what may be an even more forlorn effort, to fold Thomas Carlyle to their collective bosom. It so happens that Carlyle had a famous quarrel with Mill, in ...”

“... than the licensed torture of a woman who knew women didn’t need men. By the time of John Badham’s 1979 Dracula, starring Frank Langella as ‘a Dracula of fusion’, the women have become ‘victims no more’, but passionate creatures liberated by his bite – seekers ‘who embrace vampirism as the sole available escape from ...”

“... attempts to mollify Bloom for having cruelly depicted her in his novel Deception; the review by John Updike of Operation Shylock that drives Roth to commit himself to a psychiatric hospital, suffering from a nervous breakdown; the arsenal of psychotropics (Lithium, Halcion, Xanax, Valium, Prozac) used to calm the couple’s respective nervous systems as ...”

“... it away. It is an idea with a long history, invoked by early liberals like Richard Overton and John Locke as a way of asserting people’s rights to freedom against governments which sought to conscript them militarily or force them to practise the state religion. The reason for its recent resurrection by libertarians of the New Right, and especially ...”

“... of State for Foreign Affairs. That was fully up to the level of prickliness displayed by John Thadeus Delane, editor of the Times, in his famous exchange with Lord Derby over the accession to power of Napoleon III 28 years earlier, and serves to show that, even if the Standard had allowed its financial independence to be corrupted, it never permitted ...”

“... in which these cultural chronologies are combined in the work of Yeats and Joyce, George Moore and John Synge, and even, in a curious manipulation, Wilde and Shaw. Yet, although this reading is brilliantly executed by Eagleton, an alternative view is possible. Almost all critiques of colonial literatures are predicated on the notion that they suffer from a ...”

“... Boers’ spy in the town, reporting to the ‘Irish Brigade’ in the Boer Army which was led by John MacBride (the husband of Maud Gonne; I assume Kiernan is the novelist’s creation). Kiernan has two feisty daughters, Bella and Jane, who supply the romantic subplots very efficiently. Bella will ingeniously escape the siege with her Portuguese hairdresser ...”

“... fictions dependent on that end. He is keenly pro-life, and quotes, ultimately with approval, what John Cage said in response to a complaint that there was too much suffering in the world – namely, that on the contrary there was just the right amount. This is theodicy with God left out, or replaced by Nature. The argument here is that Darwin and Freud so ...”

“... turns. At first it seems as if it is going to be a biographical account of the trickster figure of John Laroche, one of the thieves in question. Laroche is an obsessive collector, having been through passionate affairs with turtles, fossils and tropical fish before committing himself to orchids – at least for some of the time Orlean knew him. It is at a ...”