“... 1954) but on its ability to tell complex stories – its contributors included William Faulkner, John Updike, Jack Kerouac and Don DeLillo. In Blood in the Garden, Herring is firmly in narrative mode, and he wants to remind us what a good narrative sport basketball is.This is true for several reasons, some more interesting than others. First, the obvious ...”

“... world, peering timidly into the window of Peppe Ramundo Menswear and Black Tie. The statue of St John on the stone bridge was the one that all the tourists touched; there was a superstition that it meant you would return to Prague someday. The part of the statue that was touched had become brighter, not like the dull dark rest of the bridge; it was the ...”

“... greed. Even some of the 19th century’s best-known bibliophiles, among them Henry Bradshaw and John Ruskin, were not above dismembering books to see how they were made or to snip out attractive miniatures. Collages and ‘leaf books’ (composites made of folios sliced from disparate manuscripts) enjoyed a late Victorian vogue. Today, priceless books of ...”

“... The Ancient Paths was not so revolutionary. It belongs squarely to a tradition dating back to John Toland’s History of the Druids. Toland, who seems to have invented the term ‘pantheism’, believed he had uncovered ‘the philosophy of the Druids concerning the Gods, human souls, Nature in general and in particular the Heavenly Bodies’, but died ...”

“... victims of what Outram diagnoses as the failure to transcend homo clausus. The liberal speculator, John Stuart Mill, asked himself if he’d be happy were all his projects to be fulfilled, answered no, and fell into suicidal despair. Substitute mammon for his mission, and Mill’s tale can be repeated for Messrs Merdle and Melmotte, the classic overreaching ...”

“... of their chosen concept – however often they invoke post-modernity – in the old familar way. John Carlos Rowe gives us a sober, useful historical treatment of the development of the concept of structure; Barbara Johnson lucidly recounts the steps by which ‘writing’ came to mean what it now means, though ends with the revolutionary claim that ‘what ...”

“... 20 fall into this category. ‘Edward’ (who concedes that his continued abuse of reluctant ‘John’ shows that he did not love him), ‘Robert’ (who recognises the fraudulence of saying that ‘the boys aren’t really hurt’) and Matthew (who is ‘still very disgusted with people who want to have sex with children’) are all described by Dr Li as ...”

“... troops which an adaptive academic might best give, the sort of thing which in our own time Sir John Hackett would fully understand. It has not been unknown in great soldiers; neither was Lawrence’s other quality, a dishevelled contempt for punctilio and natty dress; Oliver Cromwell, no less, was referred to in awe as ‘that sloven’. Lawrence, for all ...”

“... can, into fantasy. He has some sympathy with the familiar constipation-theory, made so much of in John Osborne’s chronicle-play. ‘Luther’s scatology-permeated language has to be taken seriously as an expression of the painful battle fought body and soul against the Adversary.’ It may be worthwhile to recall that shit is nearly as plentiful in Marx’s ...”

“... dialect’ that each artist makes his own. On Dickens, on Joyce, on Elizabeth Bishop and John Betjeman – perhaps the best essays – he has things to say both brilliant and new. But he wouldn’t have said them, paradoxically, had he not been a critic capable of mistakes. In all his essays he brings virtues easy to class as ‘journalistic’ up to ...”

“... but the tone suggests that a scroll has been discovered revealing that it was actually St John the Baptist who fed the five thousand and that future versions of the Bible would be revised accordingly. There was, of course, no call for Chatto and Windus to proffer any evaluation in a letter of that kind but Margaret Forster could in her book have ...”

“... as a setting for sculpture are the consequences of a single-minded pursuit by its main architect, John Russell Pope, of its underlying purpose, which was to provide a famous dealer in need of respectability, Lord Duveen, with a chance to display his munificence on a colossal scale. So the space seems designed to diminish any person or thing that enters ...”

“... of pounds’ worth of construction work on order from one of Britain’s top builders, Sunley. John MacArthur, a senior director of Kleinwort Benson, told millions of people watching Channel Four’s Business Programme that the Fayeds’ business empire was worth ‘seven billion dollars’. Now, everyone knows that many of the Fayeds’ claims were ...”

“... compensates for any parsimony in the archival evidence available to him. For example, in 1945 Sir John Colville recorded in his diary, since published and now firmly in the public domain: ‘I don’t like the would-be ingratiating way in which Macmillan bares his teeth.’ Davenport-Hines digresses at some length, starting from the observation that ...”

“... Once upon a time, a distinguished French Department in a well-known British university set a question on Diderot in its Final Examination. Owing to a couple of unfortunate misprints, his name appeared as ‘Piderst’. Understandably, it was not a popular question. But it did attract one answer, from a candidate who discussed the merits of Piderst with enthusiasm, if in rather general terms ...”