“... with the frankly socialist movement associated with such names as Keir Hardie, Tom Mann and John Burns, but Bernard Shaw (in spite of his philandering, of which Beatrice strongly disapproved) was a regular guest at the famous Webb lunches. Manual workers were conspicuous by their absence. Possibly Beatrice never quite escaped from the conventional class ...”

“... Satan’, and that point of view has been supported, if not phrased in quite the same way, by Pope John Paul II. So wary were the Anglo-Saxons of Latin Freemasonry that it was not until 1973 (just about the time that P2 was really getting into its stride) that the British hierarchy chose to pay it full respect. Even so, there remains a very basic difference ...”

“... that expresses itself in the twisting and hammering of poetic form. Among recent poets, John Berryman comes to mind as the ideally mischievous, ideally anguished translator of Corbière. But Pilling has done the great service of putting back into general circulation a number of long-lost pieces. This volume represents the whole of Les Amours jaunes ...”

“... which he found feathering the ‘uncomfortable nest’ of another recluse, the Sydney painter John Passmore: ‘curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist.’ The ugly face of Holden’s Performance gets in the way of a more seductive writerly presence that now unfolds, years later, in Eucalyptus. This sweet-talking book sidesteps many hurdles by ...”

“... the cover, their faded marbled fronts transformed into a bookish reliquary. This was the material John Middleton Murry mined for the selections he called the Journal and the Scrapbook, though it’s long been known that there was no such distinction. Margaret Scott, who is also co-editor of the five-volume Mansfield Collected Letters, has worked for years on ...”

“... che quindi ha poscia sua paruta,                 è chiamata ombra ... In John Sinclair’s translation: and as the air, when it is full of rain, becomes adorned with various colours through another’s beams that are reflected in it, so the neighbouring air sets itself into that form which the soul that stopped there stamps upon it ...”

“... the answer would have been very reassuring. ‘Join Atomic Energy and live a longer life,’ Sir John Hill, chairman of the Atomic Energy Authority, said in 1976. Until 1984, even the Government went on claiming there had been no deaths from radiation inside a nuclear power plant. At Windscale, the nuclear plant in Cumbria which caused some local worries ...”

“... Sternberg has shown how the sexuality of Christ himself figured prominently in Christian art; and John Boswell has pointed to Christian tolerance of homo-eroticism. Many scholars, most recently Edmund Leites (The Puritan Conscience and Modern Sexuality), have further argued that Protestantism developed positive attitudes towards a measured sensuality within ...”

“... this complex web of interests and arriving at a settlement will not be easy. According to John Stockwell, who ran the CIA’s covert programme in Angola during the Seventies, it was the Agency which laid the first stone in what is now an edifice of superpower rivalry. In Stockwell’s account, the Americans began funding the FNLA, one of three ...”

“... of photography and sound recording) adds further terminological lubrication. In his earlier book John Donne, Undone (1986) Docherty poured scorn on Eliot’s theory of ‘dissociation of sensibility’ in 17th-century poetry, a theory which – so far as Donne was concerned – Eliot in any case quickly abandoned. Docherty’s ‘modern age’ is a vague ...”

“... unsettling impression of being otherwise cut up. Contrasted perhaps with Moreau’s 1876 vision of John the Baptist’s head, we see in The Gross Clinic how perspective may be arranged – to disfigure figures more traumatically – by making them difficult for the beholder to figure out. A modern account of the Medusa attraction is that of the ...”

“... short by the Greek Civil War, she came back to London and more of the same, except that now rich John Sutro was her principal beau, with Connolly in hot pursuit. Predictably what clinched it for Connolly was a holiday she spent in Geneva with Sutro. The wedding took place, ‘after a year’s talk of marriage’, on 5 October 1950. They quarrelled on their ...”

“... with long extracts from newspapers. There is even a trace of pomposity. Explaining his support for John McDonnell as his vice-chairman, he writes: ‘I would prefer him to be my successor.’ Perhaps the first recorded evidence of the Divine Right of Kens. Too much of his book reads like standard, stale political autobiography whose basic theme is that the ...”

“... This is not hard to explain. In studies of traditional contraception and abortion practices, John Riddle has demonstrated how often knowledge of therapeutic agents formerly possessed by the folk memory and by medical practitioners has been lost. Urbanisation obliterates hand-me-down lore. Medicine’s growing claims to scientific status result in ...”

“... lives and who provided a space in which those to come could breathe. Kerouac, Genet, Burroughs and John Coltrane were there before Timothy Leary, Marcuse, Germaine Greer and the Beatles. I remember feeling wretched in the early Sixties that I had been born too late, the Beats had already happened, the parade, the great time had passed before I was old enough ...”