“... And the lead role has attracted all the dashers over the years, from Gerald du Maurier through John Barrymore and Ronald Colman to David Niven. I particularly enjoyed the Yorkshire TV series in the 1970s, with Anthony Valentine as a notably suave and sinister Raffles and Christopher Strauli as a frightened Bunny. The combination of mannered elegance and ...”

“... defendants (the journalists, Crispin Aubrey and Duncan Campbell, and the former signals corporal, John Berry) meditating passing any information to ‘the enemy’ – except (an important qualification) insofar as the British Security Services have always regarded the British public as the enemy. The ABC Trial was intended to be a sensational public show ...”

“... comfort, but a lot of it very attractive. I came to the reviews with no expert knowledge of what John Sutherland calls ‘the fiction industry’ and ‘the reviewing establishment’. His two excellent books, Fiction and the Fiction Industry (1978) and the recently published Best-Sellers *, have helped me greatly.Other People was published on 5 ...”

“... than his sexuality? Was his religious upbringing more important than his reading of the American masters? Were his sadness and anger more important than his love of laughter, his delight in the world? Did his prose style, as the novelist Russell Banks claimed that evening, take its bearings from Emerson, or was it, as the writer Hilton Als put it, ‘a ...”

“... staff. At one level, then, modern Presidential wives pose the same kind of problem as the wives of Masters of Colleges or the wives of diplomats or the wives of royalty do in this country. With the rise of female expectations, all arrangements of this kind have come under strain, since intelligent women are no longer so content to stay in the background or to ...”

“... German interests were on a collision course. As the biographers of Baldwin, Keith Middlemas and John Barnes, observed, ‘the government had awakened to a danger that had nothing to do with any question of marriage.’ Charles Higham quotes an FBI file in Washington: ‘Certain would-be state secrets were passed on to Edward, and when it was found that ...”

“... is part of the authenticating tease (‘real life’ got its own back when later circus-masters developed a habit of giving to ordinary dwarfs the name of Lilliputians). Captain John Biddel, who brought Gulliver back from Lilliput in his ship, was apparently not so scrupulous as Gulliver. According to ...”

“... part because of the insistence on decking out the female form with lashings of drapery. Only a few masters like Braquehais or the painter Degas (if the attribution is correct) are able to breathe life into these conventions derived from the painter’s studio. The turn of the century brings a reversal: the art nude enters its golden age, while the erotic nude ...”

“... education for all’ was the cry, but the educationalists who raised it were masters of abstract windbaggery – a vague secular religion of moral and spiritual uplift. What it came down to in the end was another year at school, with boys learning to bake a cake and girls to mend a fuse: all very well-meaning, but hardly the stuff of a ...”

“... hens and playing with spinning wheels their husbands are not portrayed as blacksmiths. ‘The old masters’, observed the sculptor John Gibson, ‘represented men thinking, and women tranquil – the Greeks the same.’ Certainly it is true that very few women frown in portraits – frowning being the most obvious way of ...”

“... sin beyond belief’, but wants them greened out of existence (almost literally – like John Hersey’s Hiroshima, Cohn’s island’s vegetation has vivid accesses of post-nuclear lushness). The old Thunderer has turned ecologist and technocrat, and his vendetta against man retains some of that insouciance which impels some deities old and new to ...”

“... But he does his best to enliven things with biographical vignettes. The revelation that John Ashbery was a radio Quiz Kid at the age of 14 does nothing to undermine my prejudices against his work, but the ever-catholic Perkins gives a sympathetic introduction. How far, though, is the book a history? By continual cross-cutting, Perkins gives an idea ...”

“... as a representative extract for much longer and more elaborate babblings, such as the full text of John Berryman’s ‘Step One’, prelude to the general confession he made for Alcoholics Anonymous, wherein the sufferer relates all the harm he has done himself and others. If the day ever comes when I pin that document above my typewriter, it will be because ...”

“... power relations. Hobbes’s ulterior aim was, of course, to defend a form of absolutism, extending John Selden’s thought that, in a household, only one man’s there to buy the meat. But Hobbes’s views about meaning threaten to prove subversive. Counterfactuals – imagined possibilities – can be used to challenge the status quo. Invert hegemony ...”

“... a tinge of abjection, servants were to be called ‘domestic workers’ and their mistresses and masters would for the first time be ‘employers’. While DWU members wanted ‘a union such as the miners have’, many of their demands reflected the peculiarly intimate nature of living in. Better food, the right to use the same bathrooms as their ...”