“... this country. His notions about its burial customs drew heavily on Young’s Night Thoughts and Gray’s Elegy, poems then honoured in Italy. That Foscolo himself should end up in an English churchyard would have seemed absurd in 1807. Yet the seed that led him to an impoverished death in Chiswick had already germinated. Foscolo was always something of an ...”

“... Le Guin set the action of her novel on a planet where perpetual winter provides an appropriately gray and colourless backdrop. But even she could not quite sustain the imaginative leap required: once a month her characters acquire sexual characteristics, but at random – an individual may be male one month and female the next. Why do we have sex at ...”

“... be. ‘Literary work’ in copyright law is thus a semantic convenience of the same order as ‘John Doe’: what it is all depends. The legal fiction that the literary work has an abstract, single existence which accompanies but mysteriously transcends any book fits in nicely with the academic theory of ‘text’. It is no accident that the century which ...”

“... a year as Literary Editor for the Nation, doing so well at matching books and reviewers that John Crowe Ransom said he deserved a Pulitzer Prize for it. ‘Not since Poe had an American poet laid down the law in quite such a carnival spirit.’ In those days of talented amateurs the Eng Lit business was still the Gay Science. Used by Nietzsche, and as a ...”

“... indefinitely, and by the 1920s her appearance had altered, and shocked. ‘Her wind-blown gray hair, her startled gray eyes, her thin white face, belonged to a reluctant visitor from another world, frightened at what she had undergone in this one.’ The biographer has not so much to reconstruct her life as to ...”

“... of a displaced society in which few of the traditional myths – Red Clydeside on one hand and John Buchanite Tory collectivism on the other – have still got any clout. Piecing together a history in which one has been involved, one tends to isolate symbols or epiphanies which offer metaphors of change: Yeats’s ‘monstrous familiar images’. Another ...”

“... allegiance of the individual talent to the collective identity of the team. In this light John Major’s cricketpersonhood is no accident, since the person who put the ‘gray’ back in Great Britain knows very well that cricket washes whiter. Nash avoids such immediately topical reference in favour of an old and ...”

“... praising it to the skies (and then grounding a few objections), I need to declare an interest. John Lennard says in his acknowledgments that he is in debt to me. Nothing like as much as I (and many others to come) now stand in debt to him, but his IOU had better be spelt out. First, that in some measure he took off from a 1978 essay of mine on Geoffrey ...”

“... a pantheon. So the nation took its atavism elsewhere: to places like Stoke Poges, where Thomas Gray was buried in the churchyard he’d made legendary, and especially to Stratford, sanctified by the grave of Shakespeare. This argument about nationalism isn’t watertight, since it was London that spoke for the nation, and London never got Shakespeare ...”

“... Jeffrey Gray’s scientific biography of the Russian physiologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov is a worthy member of the distinguished Modern Masters series, which includes excellent semi-technical short books on, among others, Einstein, Wittgenstein, Russell, Freud, Piaget and Chomsky. The author, who lectures in the Department of Psychology at the University of Oxford, writes from first-hand expert knowledge of experimental work in animal behaviour and the relevance of experiments on animals to human neurology and psychology ...”

“... the over-exposure of his wares in Hollywood’s window. Zane Grey was born in 1872 as ‘Pearl Gray’ – a name which he later changed for the same reasons that Marion Morrison became ‘Duke’ John Wayne and Izzy Demsky became Kirk Douglas. There was another motive. Grey’s birthplace was Zanesville in Ohio – a ...”

“... assistant. A typical letter from Malone asks where he might find a particular prologue by Sir John Denham, wonders whether Warton has come across any mention of ‘Marocco’ (a famous acrobatic horse exhibited around Europe in the 1590s), enquires about any use of ‘the pun on Ajax and A-jakes previous to Sir ...”

“... The date was 24 March 1847; the place was the home of a friend on Hill Street in Hannibal, where John Clemens had taken to his bed with a cold that developed into pneumonia. It was in that room, only minutes before his father’s final rattling breaths, that young Sam for the first time watched one member of his family kiss another. His dying father ‘put ...”

“... martyr to a subversive cult.’ This was wrong: ‘His childish hints at strange sins in Dorian Gray and other works are mere rhetoric … His one great hatred was of dullness, which is very dangerous and can raise a whole nation in its defence.’ Ford Madox Ford, in an article written in 1939, agreed about Wilde’s essential harmlessness, but viewed his ...”

“... calling for reform and to that end appointed the ultra-respectable public school headmaster Sir John Wolfenden to chair it. When Wolfenden recommended that homosexual acts between consenting adults over the age of 21 should no longer be considered a crime the Report was shelved by the Home Office. In the late Fifties, however, the Homosexual Law Reform ...”