“... the artist,’ D.H. Lawrence wrote, ‘trust the tale.’ It must be his most famous aphorism – David Lodge even called it ‘a cardinal principle of modern hermeneutics’. It has proved especially popular with critics who want to deny authors the last word on their work. ‘What if a reader construes a poem in a way you felt you didn’t mean?’ an ...”

“... transformed when in Ulysses he composed a spoof list of names invited to the marriage of the grand high chief ranger of the Irish National Foresters, which includes ‘Mrs Barbara Lovebirch, Mrs Poll Ash, Mrs Holly Hazeleyes’ and other arborial frolics. As it lists and explores literary names, riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, this rich book seems ...”

“... Life! O Sun!’ Elsewhere Graves has the war inverting other myths: his version of ‘Goliath and David’ (‘For Lieut. David Thomas, 1st Batt. Royal Welch Fusiliers, killed at Fricourt, March 1916’) reverses the biblical tale of giant-killing: ‘“I’m hit! I’m killed!” young ...”

“... flourishes, and its crowning glories are the five volumes of the Poems edited by Paul Hammond and David Hopkins and published by Longman between 1995 and 2005. But the pleasures of scholarship are not wholly coextensive with those of reading. Students are probably still encouraged to enjoy the measured venom of the satires. But where to go beyond that? Paul ...”

“... the Black Dwarf.’ We had a vote, and everyone was in favour, which was rare – I think even David Mercer, who was the most grumpy attendant at these meetings. So that’s how it happened, and we raised money for a broadsheet, the first broadsheet on Mayday 1968, and people poured in with offers of help. When I think back on it, it was quite ...”

“... in a performance of ‘Buffalo Bill’s Wild West’. Julia’s illustrated programme for a ‘“Grand Concert” donné par Mlles Boit’ in 1891 suggests that they were also able to entertain themselves. But few such documents have survived. Hirshler has to fill out the picture by using the memoirs of Wharton, who was six years older than Florence and born ...”

“... to other governments, and as a covert instrument (and often scapegoat) of presidential grand strategy. But the CIA’s most important product, Hayden says, is truth: evidence meticulously gathered and arranged for presidential consumption. Hayden’s truth is the truth from John 8:32, which is carved into the marble wall of the lobby of the CIA’s ...”

“... who lived at Melbury House near Evershot, in west Dorset. Built in the 16th century, Melbury is a grand English country house with formal gardens, lakes and an extensive deer park. Lord Digby (1809-89) was Sir Edward St Vincent Digby, the earl’s son-in-law. Walton, the gamekeeper, was William Walton; according to the 1861 census, he was born around 1800 in ...”

“... law generally prevails over democratic discontent in spite of adverse electoral consequences. David Cameron must have looked on in envy: he’d tried to talk tough on immigration without any authority to reduce Britain’s openness to southern Europeans. Merkel meanwhile profited from continuing to talk up German openness while having ensured that Germany ...”

“... and its immobilisation in infrastructure – a ‘spatial fix’, in the words of the geographer David Harvey – is one progenitor of Xi’s grand initiative. China’s treatment by the US is another.In October 2011, Obama’s then secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, announced the birth of ‘America’s Pacific ...”

“... dramatised, his master’s compositions. Rembrandt later returned to the subject, at least twice. David de Witt suggests in his catalogue essay that it wasn’t the subject, an exotic conversion story long interpreted in terms of the whitening of the soul by Christian baptism, that encouraged this flurry of painted renditions, so much as the pretext it gave ...”

“... natural tendency towards quietism and silence. In 1920, after a career lasting half a century, the Grand Old Man of English Letters writes to Alfred Noyes: ‘ “What a fool one must have been to write for such a public!” is the inevitable reflection at the end of one’s life.’ But there is, necessarily, more to Hardy than this, and he was always torn ...”

“... obliged to valorise his home-life and ordinary West of Scotland experience by dressing them up in grand language: the result is that his subject-matter is patronised by Literature, which bestows such poemy titles as ‘Thyestes in Ayrshire’ and ‘No Ultima Thule’. The Wee Malkies are replaced by the Visigoths, while sexual touch makes ‘pores bloom to ...”

“... he’d junk it or record it some other time. In the Eighties, though, he began experimenting with grand studio effects, nearly always to the detriment of the song concerned. A potentially excellent album like Empire Burlesque (1985) is almost ruined by disastrous over-production that includes disco-funk synthesisers, intrusive backing singers and overdubbed ...”

“... read too much into women’ and ‘loved his own ideas in them and never really felt grand passion’. All the same, he would have felt something. 1786 was a momentous year. In early September Goethe left secretly for Italy, sending Carl August a farewell note en route: ‘I am going in order to correct all kinds of defects and complete all kinds ...”