“... For thirty years he railed in vain against the leadership, first of MacDonald, Snowden and Jimmy Thomas, then of Attlee, Morrison, Bevin and the upstart Gaitskell, antagonising the union bosses and the PLP equally, the darling only of the constituencies. He was expelled from the party in 1939 and very nearly again in 1955, and by the time Attlee finally ...”

“... between the places where the earliest ‘Robinhood’ surnames are found, is the huge honour of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster (1298-1322), stretching right across Northern England, and down through the Midlands to Sussex. Building on this vital clue, Holt goes on to resolve the peasant-gentleman debate by dissolving it. The word ‘yeoman’ in the later Middle ...”

“... the value of words in the struggle against the Crown when he gave the oration at the funeral of Thomas Ashe, who died on hunger strike in 1917: ‘That volley which we have just heard is the only speech which it is proper to make over the grave of a dead Fenian.’ In the early and mid-Seventies, the sheer scale of the conflict with the British Army and the ...”

“... roster of American writers, including Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Philip Roth and Garry Wills – whose analyses of Nixon, Reagan and Wayne blazed the trail for Nixon at the Movies – took him on as a character. Pundits have searched for literary antecedents (Uriah Heep, Tartuffe, Richard ...”

“... system that had once been popular with students and sermon note-takers, and was later used by Thomas Jefferson. Pepys had included a tachygraphy manual in the Bibliotheca Pepysiana, and Tomalin concludes that poor Smith ‘carried out the entire task without knowing that the key to the shorthand was in the library’. Loveman’s careful analysis of the ...”

“... This duality, or ambivalence, of Freud’s has not always been noticed. For example, whereas Thomas Mann saw in Freud’s ‘unmasking of happening as really doing...the innermost core of psychoanalytic theory’, T.W. Mitchell, one of Freud’s earliest British supporters, saw him as ‘dominated by the prevailing ...”

“... Material Place – ‘All men say “What” to me,’ Emily Dickinson wrote in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson. She certainly mystified Higginson. He never entirely overcame his uneasiness about her odd, disjunctive words and bewildering epistolary tones and seven years into their correspondence still complained of being unable to get beyond the ...”

“... Gone with the Wind.”’ O’Connor’s Georgia could hardly be further from the Tara of Margaret Mitchell. O’Connor has much fun mocking elegant diction and manners, and the Southern obsession with bloodlines: ‘I know you’re a good man,’ the Grandmother tells the psychotic Misfit, who is on the run from the federal penitentiary, in ‘A Good Man Is ...”

“... me lies; the lyric-writer for US and the author of ‘Tell me lies about Vietnam’ was Adrian Mitchell, one of my colleagues on the Black Dwarf. He also brought out a book of poems in 1968 with a quotation from a news report about Vietnam stretched across the top of each page: In front of us a curious figure was standing, a little crouched, legs ...”

“... and Nancy Kassebaum, the former World Bank president James Wolfensohn and the former UN ambassador Thomas Pickering – urged Obama to talk to Hamas. But the power of the Israel lobby makes any direct overture risky. Legal restrictions, too, would have to be overcome: three years ago, the US Congress passed a law banning the use of funds for diplomatic contact ...”

“... that has led to the call for a return to history. Or, in the translation for academics by W.T.J. Mitchell, editor of Chicago’s prestigious journal Critical Inquiry, the profession ‘now feels the need for a new historicism in order to scrutinise the values, interests and powers served by the proliferation of hermeneutic techniques’. Jerome McGann and ...”

“... has enriched our recent fiction – most remarkably, perhaps, the novels of Peter Ackroyd, D.M. Thomas, Beryl Bainbridge, Julian Barnes and Thomas Keneally, whose Schindler’s Ark was marketed in America (under a slightly different title) as non-fiction and in Britain as a novel. Writers of light fiction, too, have added ...”

“... eyes two great tears rolled, like stones, and he died’) I thought sadder than anything in Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen. I was also interested in Thomas Kinsella’s ‘Another September’, because I knew the house just outside Enniscorthy where it was set and I had met the poet’s wife, whose sleeping figure was ...”

“... Patsy O’Hara, Raymond McCreesh, Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson, Kevin Lynch, Kieran Doherty, Thomas McElwee and Michael Devine – starved themselves to death in the months that followed. During that summer of 1981, the Northern Ireland crisis came closer than ever before or since to carnage. Levels of mob as well as of subversive violence were high. In ...”

“... makes me wish I were writing about the work of Fulke Greville or Sir Walter Ralegh or Sir Thomas Wyatt. I studied English and History. In English we were told almost immediately by Seamus Deane that we must bring nothing of ourselves, of our personal experience to a poem when we read. A poem was a verbal structure, and our job was to define the nature ...”