“... She has found powerful helpers on the far right. In her Preface she thanks the Bradley and John M. Olin Foundations for their grants. These bodies are among the most generous contributors to right-wing organisations such as the National Review, the Heritage Foundation and the National Association of Scholars. Lefkowitz sits on the advisory board of the ...”

“... cart as well. We can’t be sure about this yet, in the darkling subsidence of Majorism. However, John Redwood, Sir George Gardiner and Michaels Howard and Portillo are scarcely arguments against the view. ‘The source of the authority and legitimacy of government ... the personification of the nation ... an institution vital to our national ...”

“... single reference to Larbaud I was able to find in any text on Nabokov was a letter to a Professor John Kenneth Simon at the University of Illinois, sent from Montreux in February 1971, in which Nabokov says he does not remember ‘having ever read anything by Valery Larbaud – even in my youth when I absorbed a lot of contemporaneous French stuff’. Why was ...”

“... Wars, and much less, provoke vehement disagreement. There are only a few ‘upright men’ (John Heilbron’s word for Max Planck in The Dilemmas of an Upright Man) who are able to cope with contradictions in an effort to achieve some sort of balance and perspective even under the most trying circumstances. Wallace is by no means a cynic, however, and ...”

“... is he/she overrated? – they would quickly decline into paranoia. When Robert Frost died, John Berryman’s first response was It’s scary. Who’s Number One? Who’s Number One? Cal’s Number One, isn’t he? – which at least has the virtue of transparency. But as we modestly (and necessarily) insist that we’re just writers at work on our ...”

“... the chance she might be his mother? Surely it should be the other way around, anyway. Augustus John used to pat the heads of all the children whom he met when he walked down the King’s Road because he wasn’t sure who was or wasn’t his and didn’t like to leave anybody out. Similarly, we should all treat all old men with respect, just in case. Seed ...”

“... first sight, the most reflective thing about The Dragon in the Sword is its narcissism. Its hero John Daker, alias Flamadin, has lost his memory. This is convenient, because it enables people to be awe-stricken by his presence while he remains no more than modestly gratified. He can also rediscover his own superhuman qualities with pleasing freshness. As ...”

“... of Wight’. It is possible that Barnes may not have read Williams-Ellis: he may only have read John Gaze’s history of the National Trust, Figures in a Landscape (1988), which discusses Williams-Ellis’s vision, or perhaps Patrick Wright’s A Journey through Ruins (1991), which quotes Gaze quoting Williams-Ellis, or perhaps one of the countless other ...”

“... odd fish?’ Severn also asked, and Crane’s book is an attempt to answer that question. Edward John Trelawny was born in 1792 and died in 1881. In his later years he was a legendary figure, farouche and craggy, a solitary survivor from an epoch which already seemed fabulously remote: here, living on deep into the later Victorian age was a man who had once ...”

“... Recent interpretations of Medea have tended to focus on issues of gender and race, portraying her either as a feminist challenging Jason’s misogyny, or as a freedom fighter on behalf of the oppressed Colchian immigrants in Corinth. In what remains the best-known version of her myth, the one created by Euripides in 431 BC, her actions turn out to be as violent and tyrannical as those of her oppressors, as she kills her own children in a quest for revenge ...”

“... in the Fifties, but which have since become available. Substantial biographies of Lawrence by John Mack and Jeremy Wilson, in 1976 and 1989 respectively, have denigrated Aldington’s achievement. Nevertheless he got quite a lot right and it was never again going to be possible to treat Lawrence as simply the preux chevalier, the schoolboyish hero of ...”

“... as he gruffly liked to be known). Travis was having a party at his home, and decided to invite John Peel, then the only DJ at Radio 1 with a serious interest in the music he played. Peel, who was much older, and held a far more marginal position in the station’s daily schedule, went along out of curiosity. Looking around Travis’s house he ‘suddenly ...”

“... guests to toss the sweets about, in the manner of latter-day subalterns hurling bread rolls. In John Evelyn’s time the banquet ‘stuff’ was still being flung around the room profusely. Eventually, it seems, sweet-throwing hooligans were weaned onto confetti. Aniseed balls, resembling dark red marbles, were never the epicure’s first choice of ...”

“... was not tempting. Her mother’s example provided a bleak warning of the hazards of licence. John Chapman, publisher and sexual opportunist, tried very hard to persuade her to give herself (and her money) to him, arguing that she ‘would be able without fear and undue anxiety and without the knowledge of the world to be really united with me and to look ...”

“... out of the author’s control the more adjectives and adverbs he throws after them. In past years John Updike and Isaac Bashevis Singer, among others, have made large claims on Schulz’s behalf. While his imaginative vigour is indeed comparable with that of his great European predecessors, his work lacks their ruthless logic, the stern, paternal ...”