“... of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set itself against disco wholeheartedly. Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen describe an occasion in July ...”

“... the first poet I fell in love with as a teenager. My English teacher (who preferred Pope and Henry James) mocked me for my taste, reminding me of Shelley’s description of Wordsworth in ‘Peter Bell the Third’ as ‘a solemn and unsexual man’. Never afraid of being thought either solemn or unsexual I persevered, and even persuaded my history teacher to ...”

“... relatively standard cases of the urge to ‘be a man’. Leave it to the genteel types – William James being another and later example – to mistake manhood for the capacity to endure pre-arranged physical hardship. Their version, no doubt, of the English public school. It will be obvious that Leverenz likes to stay close to home – as with ...”

“... toward something ‘other than imagery – towards narrative’. Having broken a taboo with his frank and sometimes repellent account of his feelings for his parents, Guibert is now free to launch into his most horrendous book, Vous m’avez fait former des fantômes, a nightmarish, stomach-turning récit about capturing and torturing children. The title ...”

“... not with the Laurentian astonishingness, the clairvoyant, deep-striking and wide-ranging genius, [James] is, as critic, finely and strongly central.’ Some might find this bullying or hectoring; I, too, find it so in the abstract; yet it does keep alive a certain vocabulary, it makes us think again before discarding those words and trying for a less overt ...”

“... defined the ‘atmosphere in the cab’, they often date badly. The student of elevator scenes in James Bond movies, for example, will discover only that while Daniel Craig in Quantum of Solace (2008) instantly unleashes a crisply definitive, neoliberal backwards head-butt, Sean Connery in Diamonds Are Forever (1971) has to absorb a good deal of heavy ...”

“... arrivals in Bloomsbury from the outside. ‘Most people were at that time ordinary,’ said Frank Swinnerton, looking back with nostalgia to the beginning of the century, and Dora Carrington might have had the good luck to stay ordinary. David Garnett, introducing his selection of letters, felt that the reader might ask: ‘Who was this woman ...”

“... A Book of New Zealand Verse, there had been only poets who were New Zealanders. In a similar way Frank Sargeson (1903-82) gathered around him a group of determined cohorts who made a distinct New Zealand fiction. There is an un-measurable calculus between what the history of a region requires and the talents of the writers who are called upon to supply ...”

“... in his sleep.’ The Rover has indeed something of that verbal satisfaction which attended Henry James’s style, and grew on it and with it to the point where idea and intention became superfluous. ‘I’m never sure what it is I’m affirming,’ Conrad said despondently at this late time to a young French writer: but ‘affirmation’, in the sense that ...”

“... is just a marionette of conscience, a hodge-podge of the stiffest gestures of Gary Cooper and James Stewart. Tommy Lee Jones, the suave gay New Orleans businessman caught up in all kinds of nasty deals, is so deeply untrustworthy that you can’t take your eyes off him; everything he does is full of sleaze and interest. Donald Sutherland, by contrast, as ...”

“... Five of them had been arrested as they tried to get on a ferry to Belfast to attend the funeral of James McDade, a prominent IRA member who had blown himself to pieces planting a bomb in Coventry. They had left Birmingham by train less than half an hour before the bombs went off, and the bombs were planted within a few hundred yards of Birmingham’s New ...”

“... back of the Labour Government had been broken. Harold Wilson resigned, and begged his successor, James Callaghan, to carry out a full-scale investigation into what he felt had been the subversion of his office by the security services. Callaghan refused. Although Wilson continued with his allegations, the security services felt reprieved. Wright’s ...”

“... of the Garter, but only obliquely conceded Sidney’s personal qualities and achievements. The frank advice he offered the queen on her projected marriage with the duc d’Alençon may or may not have been welcome; his long-running quarrel with the Earl of Oxford and his coolness towards the Earl of Ormond certainly were not. Sidney’s closeness to ...”

“... where she was raised, and we hear the family conversations about land changing hands. Her father, Frank Reese, an army air corps officer, was dogged by depression to the point of hospitalisation. Her mother, Eduene, last in a long line, stamped with all the attributes we might expect a woman named Eduene to have, and provider of the particular totems her ...”

“... horrific realities of everyday life in a Nazi-conquered Britain (this found form as a novella, I, James Blunt). And in the summer of 1940 he wrote an article for Country Life entitled ‘The New “Merry England”’, in which he describes the invigorating camaraderie of Binsted, his home village, where he was the commander of the Local Defence ...”