“... of many of his acolytes, exemplified here by the arthritic jargonising of the American sociologist Lawrence Grossberg’s ‘History, Politics and Post-Modernism’, Hall pitches his tone somewhere between heavy-duty theory and zesty journalism, at once quick-footed and high-minded, showman and specialist. He is less an original thinker than a brilliant ...”

“... the managers of the Farm Security Administration camps to writers, artists and intellectuals, like John Steinbeck, the FSA photographers Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein, folklorists working for the Library of Congress, the economist Paul Taylor, the sociologist Carey McWilliams, and even Woodie Guthrie, who provided the words and music. The migrants were ...”

“... the law, doomed upholder of vanishing virtues; ‘hard, isolate, stoic and a killer’ in D.H. Lawrence’s description of the original of the breed, James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking. ‘In a lonely street, in lonely rooms, puzzled but never quite defeated’ was how Chandler himself imagined Marlowe’s future. The frontiersman and the private ...”

“... that such a tag would seem appropriate to describe any other poet of the 20th century. Why her? John Ashbery’s praise for Bishop as a ‘writer’s writer’s writer’, whose work ‘inspires in writers of every sort’ an ‘extraordinarily intense loyalty’, seems apt. And Ashbery knew that to say such a thing might be to pay ‘an ambiguous ...”

“... political and economic interests gave new priority to the Near East, young men like T.E. Lawrence and R. Allen Brown, whose university history had included the crusades by happenstance, fought in crusader territory and then went on to write the crusades into medieval history. The dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire brought the creation of new states ...”

“... who warmly sympathised with Hitler’s politics. (How many of these people also know that John F. Kennedy was an early supporter of America First?) But the underlying question was not whether Trump was giving a secret signal to anti-Semites – among his biggest supporters are the prime minister of Israel and the mayor of Jerusalem – but rather what ...”

“... the intricate and mysterious network of connections, the echoes and reflections by which, as John Hollander demonstrates in The Figure of Echo, works of literature are flexibly bound, despite all national boundaries, one to another. Such criticism then hopes to reconnect the works to a social-economic support system wherein, on new frequencies, a few of ...”

“... been traditionally consigned by inspired “phallocentric” writers such as Yeats, Whitman and Lawrence), to the realms of “inchoate darkness”,’ the unconscious, mothering, hysteria and babble? She takes as illustration a ‘conscientious Americanised version of ‘ecriture féminine that ‘uses strategies of syntactic ...”

“... Winchester as a scholar, but Edward was thought to be dim and was dispatched to Kingswood (founder John Wesley), where his father had been. It was an odd time in the public schools, major and minor. At Kingswood there was a small, flourishing Communist cell, including E.P., Arnold Rattenbury, who went on to edit the Communist cultural journal Our Time, and ...”

“... seemed to me,’ Henry James wrote to the critic and campaigner for homosexual rights John Addington Symonds in 1884, ‘that the victims of a common passion should sometimes exchange a look.’ The common passion James referred to was for Italy – or was it?Here is one double-take. In Mansfield Park, published in 1814, Mary Crawford is rattling ...”

“... lures the animal inside. In the library, as the bear dozes beside her, she picks up an edition of John Richardson’s Wacousta (1832), often called the first Canadian novel, and then reaches for the next book on the shelf: an 1858 memoir by Edward John Trelawny who ‘burned Shelley’s body and saved the heart’, who ...”

“... hospitals in unmarked vans, and unloaded at back entrances. I heard about despair. I heard General John Abizaid, commander of US Central Command, say of the insurgents: ‘I don’t think that they’re growing. I think that they’re desperate.’ I heard about hope. I heard General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, say: ‘I came away ...”

“... that it was, somehow, their home. Johann Burckhardt, William Thomson (known as Osman effendi), John Gardner Wilkinson, Robert Hay and Edward Lane also ‘went native’ on their travels. Like Champollion, they aped the robes and turbans of the Ottoman ruling class, browned their skin, and made a show of living in ‘Oriental’ style. Hay, Burton and ...”

“... abused, Cobbett inveighed, Arnold was capable of malicious insinuation, Carlyle, Ruskin and Lawrence, in their middle years, listened to no one. This may be regrettable: but I cannot see that the communication of anger, indignation or even malice, is any less genuine.’ Here, en toutes lettres, is the polemicist’s warrant. Edward’s own indignations ...”

“... isn’t the first fictional character to train for a supernaturally revealed task. The hero of John Irving’s novel A Prayer for Owen Meany, for instance, must master a particular basketball shot in order to fulfil his destiny by saving a group of children. It may be that the literary form best suited to dramatising forks in the road, paths taken and not ...”