“... or drug taking’, though Finlay seems to have missed the old bashi-bazouk’s description of Alexander Trocchi, at the same event, as ‘cosmopolitan scum’. Even a reference to bad weather, in the form of a ‘great gale’, triggers a parenthetical absit nomen (‘I do not mean Hugh MacDiarmid’). Other Scottish writers were touchy subjects ...”

“... poetic canon look like if women were included? Imagine women poets being venerated alongside Alexander Pope, who held that ‘Most Women have no Characters at all,’ or Jonathan Swift, who, at the conclusion of that catalogue of excremental horrors ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’, has his speaker remark: ‘Should I the Queen of Love refuse,/Because ...”

“... for us. Reading a poem like ‘An Tathaich’, I find myself thinking of the spectral presence in Alexander Blok’s ‘The Twelve’, swirling along in a blizzard of apprehensions where the historical moment and the personal dilemma storm into the mind in a single blast. Still, spiritual geology may be more important than emotional geography. If Beatrice is ...”

“... to the car’ – Napoleon, Voltaire, Frederick (the Great), Kant, Catherine (the Great), Plato, Alexander (the Great), Aristotle, Roman emperors from Julius Caesar to Constantine, ‘the Anarchs old’ – before describing ‘how and by what paths I have been brought/To this dread pass’.One spring morning, Rousseau found himself ‘asleep/Under a ...”

“... the degree of gravity that Presidential misdeeds must reach before they become impeachable. But Alexander Hamilton, in the Federalist Papers, suggested that impeachable offences must always involve ‘the abuse or violation of some public trust’ and result in ‘injuries done immediately to the society itself’. So how could the impeachniks justify ...”

“... he was eating when he read them: La Nouvelle Héloise with pain au beurre and a pot of coffee, Tom Jones with a roasted partridge. The contents of Rat’s picnic basket contains the world of The Wind in the Willows; the aroma of a bubble and squeak prepared by the gaoler’s daughter cheered up Toad in his prison cell; bacon and broad beans and a macaroni ...”

“... Lives, 1660-1900 quote a lawyer at the Old Bailey, cross-examining a woman called Margaret Jones in 1794. Jones’s pocket had been picked. He suggests to her that ‘ladies’ pockets are generally pretty full, they say there is no bottom to them?’ The witness bridles at the imputation: ‘I am very careful that I ...”

“... whom were preoccupied with the real-life consequences even of theoretical ideas. The mathematician Alexander Grothendieck (1928-2014), for instance, was politically engaged before becoming a recluse determined not only to reduce his carbon footprint (he lived at one point on dandelion soup) but his intellectual impact, by retracting publication of his own ...”

“... away from Stoke Newington Road concealed nuclear pockets in the secret history of our culture: Alexander Baron’s The Lowlife (1963), set in a terrace off Amhurst Road, which was where the poet Tom Raworth (‘Raworth is the man in the Island with the word in his mouth’ – Ed Dorn) operated in his Matrix Press days. A few hundred yards to the north ...”

“... Politician and Chris Whipple’s The Fight of His Life put Biden at the centre of the story, while Alexander Ward’s The Internationalists casts the administration’s foreign policy forthrightly as a team effort. All draw on published accounts and interviews with aides and officials – some named (especially in Whipple) and others not, though their points ...”

“... houses.In the face of this insanity, a test case was brought by the ‘Stonehenge Two’, Margaret Jones and Richard Lloyd, who had been charged with ‘trespassory assembly’. It reached the House of Lords in 1999, where it was decided in their favour on the basis that the right to use the public highway for any reasonable purpose was ‘an issue of ...”

“... the then CEO, visited to garner support.Azerbaijan’s oilfields were originally auctioned off by Alexander II in the second half of the 19th century. But when the Baku Commune seized power in 1917, a week after the October Revolution, it established the world’s first nationalised oil industry. A protracted struggle followed as international oil companies ...”

“... consistently attack bourgeois notions of the stable text but give the impression that the Arden or Alexander texts definitively established an eternally valid version of Shakespeare. The treatment of Shakespeare the man is a striking instance of the combination of novelty and received ideas in these books. The chief assumptions that unite the essays in the ...”

“... Alexander Pope’s slur has loomed for centuries over the reputation of Eliza Haywood, the most prominent female author of her day. In The Dunciad, she is the prize of a pissing competition held between talentless hacks:   Who best can send on high The salient spout, far-streaming to the sky; His be yon Juno of majestic size, With cow-like udders, and with ox-like eyes ...”

“... not create literature. Moby-Dick already existed by the time the reviewers came down on it. Like Alexander the Great blocking the sunlight while standing next to Diogenes in his tub, reviewing can only hinder what it has not made. I suspect that May knows this, if only because his book is a melancholy record of lost opportunities: The Rainbow and The Good ...”