“... which jumped around all over the place when he talked – which was a great deal of the time’. David Gascoyne described in his journal in 1936 how Jennings dominated a meeting of the English Surrealists, ‘as usual … boiling over with energy and excitement’. He reported, too, the scene when Jennings and Tom Harrisson met to discuss the formation of ...”

“... Apsley (1616-83). The poem described by Lee as ‘rarely accessible’, now easily accessible in David Norbrook’s modern spelling edition, offers according to Norbrook ‘a particularly strong corrective to the conventional view that literature after 1660 became firmly Royalist’, for it is entirely informed by the religious and political ideals of ...”

“... of the Mediterranean EMU member countries began to collapse. Here​ the story is picked up by David Audretsch and Erik Lehmann. They purport to reveal the ‘seven secrets’ that enabled Germany to muster, in the words of their subtitle, ‘economic resilience in an era of global turbulence’. What are these secrets? Lots of small firms ...”

“... between Collier and her friend Sarah Fielding, author of the sentimental novel The Adventures of David Simple (1744) and contributor to her brother Henry’s Joseph Andrews (1742). They had worked together before – Collier wrote a preface for the 1753 sequel to David Simple, and in 1749 they both produced critical ...”

“... recorded by the French-Mauritian chronicler Nicolas Mayeur in 1806 and reproduced in the late David Graeber’s Pirate Enlightenment, called for gun flints, lead balls, gunpowder and river water to be mixed in an upturned shield with the point of a knife, the draught then taken with ginger soaked in the blood of the oath-takers. Mayeur, a retired slave ...”

“... She exploited Austin’s role as the treasurer of Amherst College to wangle her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a Queen Anne-style house just across from his family home. After his death she conned his surviving sister, Lavinia, into deeding her some land. But, perhaps most damning of all, Emily ...”

“... sure enough, Sam Fuller shows up in Godard’s films six years later, in Pierrot le Fou, where le grand Sam appears as a party guest to define film as ‘like a battleground. Yes ... Love. Hate. Action. Violence. Death. In one word ... Emotion.’ Fuller, we have been told, is in Paris to make a movie of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal. At the time, Godard ...”

“... magpie-like, on single images of Tennyson’s, or had a subconscious memory of them – aren’t grand enough.There are several confused readings like this. Does ‘Ghost House’ ‘allude throughout’ to Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’? Can you really think of the cellar hole in the former as ‘something of an urn, “leaf-fring’d” and open on ...”

“... a radical departure from the way we have traditionally viewed our reciprocal relationships. David Marquand, in what is properly the opening essay of the book, argues that hitherto the Left has been possessed by the same ‘reductionist individualism’ as the Right. The result was a ‘paradox’: social democracy could exist only within communitarian ...”

“... to the friends who have been ignored during his obsessively protracted building of a place grand enough to entertain them adequately: but the apology, dignified and ceremonious, has more than a hint of quasi-Yeatsian self-justification. And in the ‘Price of Stone’ sequence itself (a series of 50 Shakespearean sonnets spoken in the personae of ...”

“... a quintessential experience with their fellow Americans. As it turned out, not even the terrible David Letterman managed to squeeze off a burst about Mr Simpson or anything related to the trial. The evening was, as some magazines have taken to claiming on their covers, ‘100 per cent O.J.-free’. In truth, the industry does not quite know what to make of ...”

“... than Thompson could provide. (Gold Medal signature-writers of the time included John D. MacDonald, David Goodis and that thriller writer’s thriller writer, Peter Rabe.) So during the late Fifties, when most of his proposed literary projects couldn’t find a buyer, Thompson went on to do some of his best work for Stanley Kubrick’s early films, The Killing ...”

“... but also loved them. His description of Carlyle is loving: Carlyle came – sat some time. Grand, good old man, kindest & best – Described being blown down the Embankment, like an egg-shell – so frail, yet so little susceptible of the bleak bitter cold. Dickens makes out that Podsnappery is founded in ignorance and narrowness. Mr Podsnap simply ...”

“... Haughton argues that Hill resists the temptation to succumb to ‘his glamorous rhetoric and grand style’, it is significant that none of the other contributors to this collection of critical essays raises the difficult political issues implicit in the poetry. Haughton’s fellow contributors all believe in the magical transcendence of art and the ...”

“... a Prince of Wales party, and fallen for her. She was 14 years younger, romantic, destined for some grand match. But the surgeon’s feelings may not have escaped her attention. What more natural than, like an adroit beggarmaid, to seek out in hard times the homely court of this Aesculapian Cophetua, and place herself under his protection? Lady Agnes’s ...”