“... Self and Lars von Trier with Carrington and Anna Kavan, as well as St Augustine, Giordano Bruno, Philip K. Dick, Walt Disney and J.R.R. Tolkien. Her cast of ‘imagined puppets’ ranges from the entertainers in Ben Jonson’s Bartholemew Fair, through E.T.A. Hoffmann’s weird Olympia to Karel Capek’s robots, and such lower forms of life as ...”

“... speak what I’ve made to the king./My tongue is the pen of a rapid scribe.’) The lute music of Philip Sidney in the 1580s: How long (O Lord) shall I forgotten be?      What? ever? How long wilt Thou Thy hidden face from me      Dissever? (13) And Sidney’s sister, the Countess of Pembroke, ten years later, bringing in the whole ...”

“... of Spartan diplomacy plenty of ammunition for his own campaign against garrulity. When King Philip II of Macedon sought to intimidate the Spartan leadership by declaring that ‘If I invade Laconia, I shall turn you out,’ their reply was a simple ‘If’. The laconic riposte is a pivot or judo throw that makes use of an opponent’s superior weight ...”

“... saw the light) of being saddled with the old assumptions. He points out that it is easy to be French without caring a great deal about wine, but it would still be silly to deny that there is a French culture of wine. In the same way, there need be no involvement on the part of any individual gay man with ...”

“... with the scenes where the Romanian takes off and abandons the farmer heartrending as the idyllic French film never is quite. In the days when I might have written a television film like this it would never have been put on and even today, epic of sheep-farming though it is, I don’t see it forming one of the Saturday night film shows they have in our ...”

“... the poleis of Archaic Greece, the baillis who first appear in the administrative echelons of the French monarchy in the reign of Philip Augustus, the armed retainers of tenth and 11th-century Japan who attached themselves to regional lords rather than to the central government, the early English factory-owners still ...”

“... populations were not sent to the gas chambers. That is, the descendents of Swedish, Italian, French, Russian, German, Greek, Polish, Korean, Chinese and Japanese immigrants, all present in huge numbers in the United States, also fairly quickly lost their languages. (The only great exceptions here are the immigrants from Latin America, who have ...”

“... intimidation by the KGB. One of his first cases was that of Zhores (the Russian spelling of the French socialist’s Jean Jaurès’s name) Medvedev, the biologist and twin brother of Roy, who had been arrested and confined in a psychiatric hospital when his ‘scandalous’ book The Rise and Fall of Lysenko was published in the West. Sakharov responded by ...”

“... Malley’s poems, nestled up against an audacious collaboration between Frank O’Hara and the French language.) Both Ashbery and Koch have included Malley in the curricula of their university poetry courses. At exam time Ashbery would present his students with two unattributed poems, one from The Darkening Ecliptic and one from Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian ...”

“... where it relates specifically to the personality of the poet, always has a teasing quality. Philip Larkin, who admired Housman officially and also less openly, had many of the same characteristics. Housman can be brutally exclamatory and immediate, though always poised. When the bells justle in the tower       The hollow night amid, Then on my ...”

“... and become a book-market researcher pure and simple. Mann’s title sails uncomfortably close to Philip Gaskell’s From Writer to Reader (OUP, 1978). Gaskell’s book, subtitled ‘Studies in Editorial Method’, was as bibliographical as the other is sociological. What intervenes between writer and reader for Gaskell is not the undifferentiated ...”

“... can be publicly disclosed. Philby makes an appearance in The Baby Sitters and a thinly disguised Philip Agee in Moscow Gold. Both put Ellison onto important leads. As with the Bond books, Salisbury delivers the requisite doses of sex, sadism and snobbery; there is much good living, genitals encounter genitals and genitals encounter electrodes at regular ...”

“... commonplace.’ Russell’s letters to other correspondents are rather less dispiriting. With the French mathematician and logician, Louis Couturat, he kept up a brisk correspondence on the Boer War, a conflict which Russell first approved because he felt British authority in Africa was at stake, then deplored because he disapproved of war and imperialism in ...”

“... and then at Queen’s; his literary life with Seamus Deane, Derek Mahon, Michael and Edna Longley, Philip Hobsbaum, and the workshop that Hobsbaum convened, the Group; and the grisly metamorphoses of Northern Irish public life, from simmering inequality and half-suppressed resentment into the worst of the Troubles. Each of these developments affected ...”

“... The North’s industrial rulers were uneasily ‘adrift on a proletarian sea’, and after the French Revolution feared drowning. There was no nation-making bargain between owners and workers to destroy the old elite. Instead, ‘the tumbrils of Paris encouraged the Westminster old guard and the new captains of industry to huddle together for mutual ...”