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“... of Iowa, who says in his new book, Body Heat: Temperature and Life on Earth (due from Harvard in May), that ‘Pluto is cold; Chicago in January is merely inconvenient.’ For those of us still languishing in the dark ages of terrestrial analogue TV, the gloom is deepened by the fog that currently envelops BBC2’s schedules: the Winter Olympics. The last ...”

“... light by Wordsworth, as an example of all that was merely poeticised. In a letter to his friend Richard West, Gray happily declared the very attitudes to poetic diction that Wordsworth was later to detect and condemn. ‘The language of the age is never the language of poetry,’ he observed. By which he meant that it never should be. ‘Our poetry ...”

“... It was Richard Crossman who described secrecy as ‘the British disease’. As with other alleged vices anglais – strikes, spanking and sodomy spring to mind – this seems on the surface to be unfair. Other societies have undoubtedly been as secretive. Soviet Russia, for example: I don’t suppose it was any easier to see your medical records there than it is here ...”

“... life to lead and objects very much to critics who ignore that courteous distinction. In fact, as Richard Rand informs us in his Preface, Ponge was present at the colloquium in Cérisy-la-Salle where Derrida first delivered portions of his text. So we are not to expect any clumsy intrusions of unlicensed biographical fancy. In taking ‘Francis Ponge’ as ...”

“... should legitimate neither gay unions nor ‘man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be’.) Meanwhile, one of the most powerful evangelical leaders in America, Reverend Ted Haggard of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, was caught up in a sex scandal. Haggard was a trusted adviser to the president on social issues and had drawn plenty ...”

“... Richard Pipes, Russian historian at Harvard and sometime member of President Reagan’s National Security Council, is famous for his hatred of Communism. He doesn’t like Russia much, either. Nor does he particularly care for most Russia and Soviet experts, regarding them as given to romanticising and whitewashing their subject ...”

“... believe that it has a more sinister implication than Professor Hough would allow. The 13th Cycle may be the realm of an ultimate freedom. It may be the realm into which the Cuchulainn of the plays would pass were he to offer his history as legend to the world. It may be the God that is ...”

“... place in Marin County, California – ‘the golden land’ – in 1975, and many of those whom Richard Levine talked to claimed to have seen it coming, since it was well-known that Mrs Olive and her adopted daughter hated each other. Being a minor at the time, Marlene served only three years in a Youth Authority institution, and, now at liberty, has ...”

“... For the novelist, experimentation is both demanding and risky, in that his whole enterprise may go haywire and prove unsaleable. The short-story writer is enabled, whether by subsidisation or merely by the brevity of the form or by both, to experiment without commitment. This would be fair enough if the unsuccessful experiments were scrapped. But ...”

“... take it seriously. We find Kingsley on the golf-course, discussing the problem with his colleague, Richard Short, while they wait for ‘the brisk, serious teenagers’ of Edinburgh to finish with the hole before them. Short says: ‘You’re on a real winner. Even if it is a total red herring, spontaneously resolving cancer is big news. The press will be on ...”

“... Father Rosicross, he is a sleeping giant. His stories are addressed to a woman called Moll, who may or may not exist, and at the same time to the narrator, though Moran at the end slips clean away from him. But Moran is also Master Owl, poet to a medieval chieftain, Oliver (the same Oliver, it seems, that the book is ...”

“... productive and controversial as ever. The agenda he has set out is far from completion: indeed we may only just be appreciating its measure. The volume concludes with a lengthy commentary by Pocock himself which, in reviewing each of the essays, primarily asks, not how far his earlier positions are vindicated by them, but where we should go next. The last ...”

“... called on Halleck on arrival in New York in 1842, but later wrote him off as a mere imitator. Richard Dana thought his ‘Marco Bozzaris’ was America’s best lyric poem. John Quincy Adams referred to one of his poems in a speech to the House of Representatives in 1836. Most inexplicable of all, on 15 May 1877, fifty ...”

“... and oversized penis fail to bend Will’s heterosexuality. Jack holds out hope that Will’s novel may betray affection for him, or at least an openness to sexual experimentation. Novelists, Jack believes, are under a professional obligation to be ‘odd’. And if Will’s novel turns out to be a hit and makes him a celebrity, he’ll need someone around to ...”

“... instalments will be complete this summer, has reportedly clocked up almost a hundred sales. That may not seem a lot, until you multiply it by the unit price of £30,000 (£5000 cheaper if you got in early). Chadwyck-Healey is a commercial publisher and the sales figures are now well past break-even into substantial profit. More important, enough databases ...”