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“... published by the National Portrait Gallery to accompany the BBC series of the same name, Brian Harrison, the editor of the forthcoming Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, observes that we are hardly alone ‘in placing the great at the centre of our national myth’: If Lloyd George and Winston Churchill epitomise national resistance to Germany in ...”

“... of my country and you’re not even Irish, you English cunt. You can stick it up your bollocks.’ Mark points out that ‘you’re not even Irish, you English cunt’ is like something out of Beckett. Andy wonders whether ‘you can stick it up your bollocks’ is an Irish expression or a stroke of inspiration on Keane’s part. Myself, I take a more ...”

“... the idea, including Sir Arthur Evans, who excavated Knossos, and the Cambridge classicist Jane Harrison, who proposed a prehistoric and peaceful woman-centred civilisation in Greece. The discovery of Palaeolithic ‘Venus figurines’, statuettes with exaggerated breasts and hips, seemed to support the notion. D.H. Lawrence, Robert Graves and Rudyard ...”

“... known as novelists, while others, such as Davie, Enright and Holloway, went on to make a greater mark as critics. Since it was challenging the old metropolitan literary elite and repudiating the authority of (European) high culture and (international) high modernism, the new generation of writers was taken to represent not just an emphatically English ...”

“... anticipated by a decade or so the Ginsberg party trick that shocked John Lennon and George Harrison at the dawn of Swinging London. When I interviewed one of the Six Gallery poets, Michael McClure, in 2011, he recalled earlier episodes of Dionysian frenzy with Gerd Stern and a thrash of ‘belly dancers and bongo drums’. Nights that were much closer ...”

“... enough, have a great deal invested in such matters. Value follows intention. There is no greater mark of the gap that separates writers and English departments than the question of value. The very thing that most matters to writers, the first question they ask of a work – is it any good? – is often largely irrelevant to university teachers. Writers are ...”

“... McCartney’s new lockdown solo album; various reflections on the fiftieth anniversary of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass; various reflections on the fortieth anniversary of John Lennon’s death; a trailer for Peter Jackson’s new Beatles documentary, Get Back; a new documentary about Mark David Chapman; an ...”

“... southern edge of Ireland with a blown-up inset of the Lake District. The Longman’s decision to mark Gaelic-speaking areas on a map of the British Isles announces its devolutionary agenda as clearly as the new Norton’s move to balance its traditional map of London by another of the Empire honours its growing commitment to a generously cosmopolitan vision ...”

“... and Captain Ahab, the thinking whale’s man. For Melville, as for Chase, malice is the authentic mark of the whale’s intelligence. A century and a half after the book was published, that association has become harder to sustain. The malign and the dangerous haven’t disappeared from the picture – far from it – but they’ve fallen away from the ...”

“... you would have by selling the item at the higher price. In retailer language, you can lower your mark-up but earn more because of the increased volume. Arthur Danto once observed that Andy Warhol had only one idea – roughly, that mass-produced media images could be seen as a form of art – but that what was unique about him was that he fully grasped that ...”

“... press corps dutifully reported the official Pentagon version of events. A US navy captain called Mark Hill, who was working on a project for McNamara, eventually let Hersh in on the real, catastrophic story. (Hill was one of the honourable soldiers on whom Hersh came to rely.) ‘I remember being angry, of course, but also more than a bit ...”

“... some would say it has worsened – since the first democratic elections of 1994? In the words of Mark Solms, psychoanalyst, neuroscientist and owner of a farm in nearby Franschhoek, who also attended the conference, the question for the white beneficiaries of apartheid is ‘how we had sort of got away with it’ (not the outcome he personally had ...”

“... Laurence Binyon’s in the Thirties, Dorothy Sayers’s in 1949, John Ciardi’s in 1955, Mark Musa’s in 1971, C.H. Sisson’s in 1980, not to mention an Inferno by assorted poets broadcast by the BBC’s Third Programme in 1961, the prose versions by John Sinclair and Charles Singleton, and an admirable translation – again in prose – by Robert ...”

“... a Greek Cypriot restaurant owner who had anglicised his name – and his English wife, Lesley Harrison. Georgios (‘Yorg’ to the family but mispronounced as ‘Yog’ by Andrew Ridgeley, whose version stuck) was the youngest of three children, and the only boy. He was six months old when Lesley’s brother Colin overdosed on schizophrenia medication ...”

“... mend cars, keep dogs, but still have wondrously youthful chests and are always up for it. Dogs may mark the point at which Sallis and his deconstructed/reinvented crime novel break away from the form as we once knew and loved it. Wasn’t Humphrey Bogart as Roy ‘Mad Dog’ Earle, in Raoul Walsh’s film of W.R. Burnett’s High Sierra, undone by a barking ...”