“... though) gains admission: the thoughts of Pound, Aiken, Leavis, D. W. Harding, Helen Gardner, John Crowe Ransom, Hugh Kenner and Davie shine again. But there is a lot of dross, and there are too many ill-judged omissions. If Stevie Smith’s piece on Murder in the Cathedral fails to be a review, it succeeds in being admirably inaugurative. Even the ...”

“... campaigner and local Labour Party member, read some of her poems, including a rumbustious reply to John Betjeman which she called ‘In Praise of Slough’ – ‘those bombs aren’t such a huge joke any more.’ The main session over, we were offered Judith Chernaik on Shelley’s feminism or Elma Dangerfield on Byron and Shelley or Marilyn Butler on the ...”

“... the pendulum has swung more sharply in the opposite direction than at any time since the days of John Foster Dulles. The Clark Amendment has been repealed and Congress finds itself fighting a losing rearguard action against the White House practice of bypassing its prohibition against direct CIA involvement in Nicaragua by resorting to the familiar use of ...”

“... musings on the first half of a cryptic Biblical verse (Isaiah 65: 20) reappear in Aelfric, John Mirk, perhaps Pearl; Gregory’s interpretation of the second half of the verse influences not only Bede and Aelfric but Petrarch and various Middle English works, including such an unlikely one as Dunbar’s ‘Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the ...”

“... steps of the journey back to consciousness. The bridge itself forms part of a dream, and as John Orr revives, the fantastical structure becomes a reason for carrying on dreaming, since it alone offers hope of bridging gaps in the activity of his mind which have resulted from the accident. Orr’s reaction to all this, to the dream itself, is futilely to ...”

“... Saurat to the first fifty.) The Pryce-Jones introduction has now been replaced by an Afterword by John Fowles, less sensitive, but more enthusiastic. Fowles, who follows Robert Gibson* in taking Seurel as the central character, tells us that he was once under the influence of Alain-Fournier, and is still ‘a besotted fan’. He deserts the ...”

“... and what isn’t, the Council’s main concern is of course with cash. Out of office, Norman St John-Stevas would say that government provision for the arts was wholly inadequate: in office, he reduced that provision. Lord Gowrie, better attuned to his party’s mood, was so far from thinking the grant inadequate that he cut it again and encouraged the ...”

“... battlefield as imagined in Swarming and the Future of Conflict (2000) by the RAND Corporation’s John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt. Technology, Arquilla and Ronfeldt argue, will soon make it possible for small clusters of loosely organised military units to conduct brief and co-ordinated strikes, then disperse. Message boards, similarly, allow lone hackers to ...”

“... the docks by leaping over the flames (as one jumps over the bonfire to fend off evil spirits on St John’s night), and he and his best friend, Luís Terranova, an extrovert tango singer and his temperamental opposite, go into hiding for the rest of the war. Some time later Luís is taken as a sexual pet by the local censor, Commander Dez, who, like many of ...”

“... seldom meets with moderation and when he does, it’s apt to give way to exasperation. And so John Barrell, reviewing his book on Tom Paine (LRB, 30 November 2006): Rights of Man (not The Rights of Man, as Hitchens persistently calls it) was written as an answer to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Hitchens tells us that among others ...”

“... Dee succeeded in her campaign to get Freddie, marrying the ‘pear-shaped Don Giovanni’, as John Osborne, a rare Freddie dissenter, called him. By then he was Wykeham Professor of Logic, leaving for New College on Tuesdays and coming home on Fridays. Dee moved from the Express to the leftier Daily Herald, which suited her ...”

“... at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City (114 dead). The Brooklyn Bridge stands today because John Roebling designed it to be six times stronger than it needed to be. So when Washington Roebling discovered, after his father’s death, that an unscrupulous supplier had introduced substandard wire into the cables, it was allowed to remain, as it only ...”

“... a deal for film rights not far behind; the reason it garnered glowing blurbs from Sandra Cisneros, John Grisham, Stephen King and Don Winslow; the reason it was widely listed in the American press as one of the year’s most anticipated books; the reason Oprah Winfrey selected it for her recently revived book club; and the reason it debuted at the top of the ...”

“... story has been mythologised. The only one who didn’t want to be her was her immediate successor. John Major got the job because people were finally sick to the back teeth of Thatcher’s governing style. It is hardly surprising that political leaders should try to avoid replicating the failure that immediately preceded their arrival at the summit. Major set ...”

“... inspired Hilary Mantel to write a fine novel, The Giant, O’Brien, which examines the surgeon John Hunter’s avid pursuit of specimen bodies to study, the more unusual the more covetable. At the Hunterian, which is currently closed for renovation, the Irishman’s skeleton was displayed beside that of the ‘Sicilian fairy’, Caroline Crachami, only one ...”