“... and Morrison published in Contemporary British Poetry: Douglas Dunn, Anne Stevenson, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Andrew Motion, Derek Mahon, Fleur Adcock, Carol Rumens, Medbh McGuckian, Penelope Shuttle and others. Geoffrey Hill, Dannie Abse, Denise Levertov, Peter Red-grove, U.A. Fanthorpe, Gillian Clarke, Eiléan Ní ...”

“... those which describe Thackeray conversing in his fiction with fellow novelists like Bulwer, G.P.R. James, Disraeli and Mrs Gore. Ray sees Thackeray in Vanity Fair as creating a work ‘quite as revolutionary as Ulyssess’ in its contradictions and subversions of popular fiction of the 1840s. Judging by his occasional mangling of titles (Charles Lever’s ...”

“... to express both the attraction and the repulsion awakened in him by Nazism and Hitler. To turn to Peter Longerich’s Hitler: A Life, superbly translated by Jeremy Noakes and Lesley Sharpe, is to re-encounter the sober, appraising diction that Knausgaard deplores in Kershaw’s writing. Longerich is in no doubt that his subject was emotionally ...”

“... nick of time’ she discovered that he was a con man, a thief, a racketeer – in the employ of Peter Rachman, none other – and already married with children. I learned not to trust people; I learned not to believe what they say but to watch what they do; I learned to suspect that anyone and everyone is capable of ‘living a lie’. I came to believe ...”

“... of enslaving the imperial soul – the indignity and perplexity is captured with good humour by Peter Reading: I used to pepper my poetics with sophisticated allusions to dear Opera and divine Art (one was constantly reminded of A. du C. Dubreuil’s libretto for Piccinni’s Iphigenia in Tauris; one was constantly reminded of Niccolo di Bartolomeo da ...”

“... During the 1980s, a generation of American scholars – Ron Bush, Reed Dasenbrock, Michael Groden, James Longenbach, Lawrence Rainey – set those limits by mapping in great detail the relations between the various literary Modernists and examining the genesis of their major writings. Mutual influence is by no means the sole topic of such enquiries, but it ...”

“... films as Gandhi (a severe treatment of the Raj), A Passage to India, and Heat and Dust, even the James Bond spectacular Octopussy, kept the Indian sub-continent securely in the public’s imagination. One of the most triumphant television productions of the decade was ITV’s dramatisation of Paul Scott’s ‘Raj Quartet’ under the title The Jewel in the ...”

“... forth he met Butterly’ (a parody of the Gospel report – Matthew 26.75 – of the repentant Peter: ‘Going forth he wept bitterly’)? What difference, and how many differences, does it make if you translate it as: Und als er weiterging, traf er Butterly; or Und als er weiterging, traf er Bütterlich; or Und er ging hinaus und weinte Buttermilch; or ...”

“... a journalist, jobs he held and discarded, stayed in his thoughts and haunted his novels. William James believed that the careers we might have chosen don’t matter very much: ‘Little by little, the habits, the knowledges, of the other career, which once lay so near, cease to be reckoned even among his possibilities. At first, he may sometimes doubt ...”

“... of the Enlightenment dominated historical writing as late as the 1960s, and is best represented by Peter Gay’s two magisterial volumes published in 1966 and 1969. After Gay and Cassirer, two trends dominated Enlightenment history until Israel came on the scene. One situated the Enlightenment in a particular national context, giving little attention to the ...”

“... either colour) and offers moderate but constructive proposals for the future, while James Prior, also in moderate terms, outlines his view of the role of the unions and describes those changes in the relevant law which are the objective of his own legislative programme. Tony Benn’s contribution is distinguished by its unique style, which reads ...”

“... Westerly Terrace’ (Stevens’s home address in Hartford), which takes its epigraph from Henry James (‘His alter ego “walked”–’) and begins:In the house the house is allhouse and each of its authorspassing from room to roomShort eclogues as one mightsay on tiptoe do not infringeHowe is reworking Stevens’s ‘The House Was Quiet and the World ...”

“... twins put up for adoption were separated and used for psychological studies under the direction of Peter Neubauer, who never told either them or their parents that they were twins, or that they were being studied. In our day, the political bias has resurfaced in the racist hypotheses and conclusions of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell ...”

“... sparing herself no end of eventual aggravation.Into this vacancy the editor and biographer James Atlas tentatively ventured. He had made his name with a Life of Delmore Schwartz in 1977 and had matured into a venerable if fidgety fixture in New York publishing. He and Roth had been friendly for decades. Early in their relationship, which began in ...”

“... is required to do his or her fair share of the work, even though the share isn’t, as Henry James said it should be, ‘quite half’. It consists of two separate narratives, the first fictional, the second autobiographical. Common to both is a preoccupation with the destructive impact of war on ordinary happiness. The first part is a counterfactual ...”