“... Quentin Skinner’s short book is an extended version of his Inaugural Lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. There cannot have been a less contentious succession to that chair. In his field, the history of political thought, Skinner has earned an authority and distinction unrivalled anywhere in the world among scholars now below retirement age ...”

“... sighted, overconfident rival, how to feel. More important, Lawrence’s fiction, in particular his short fiction, strives obsessively to make the invisible visible. In story after story, Lawrence writes about death or the moment of dying, of crossing over. In ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’ (1925), a woman ensnared and drugged by American Indians begins to sense ...”

“... In a wonderful short story called ‘Haha Huhu’, written in Telugu in the early 1930s, Vishvanatha Satyanarayana (1893-1976) describes an accidental traveller to England: a gandharva, a flying half-man half-horse from classical India, who loses his wings and crash-lands in Trafalgar Square. His encounter with English society as he lies captive in his cage and waits for his wings to grow back is an occasion for Satyanarayana to comment wryly on many things: among them, cultural difference, the nature of scientific progress, and the resources that Indian culture may still possess even though under colonial rule ...”

“... was ‘a Cambridge passion for Eng. Lit… . combined with a rather taking bully-boy strut’. Philip Hobsbaum, also alert to Gunn, took the view that the poem ‘Carnal Knowledge’ was ‘slick’ and ‘execrable’. Alvarez, as Wootten notes, reviewed Gunn’s first book twice. In one review, he called the collection ‘for my money, the most ...”

“... letters and her daughter’s diaries. In Point Counter Point Leonard Huxley is portrayed as Philip Quarles’s father, who in Chapter 20 is shown leaving the country for his literary work in London. He has an assignation with his ‘typist girl’ in town. ‘Brought up in an epoch when ladies apparently rolled along on wheels, Mr Quarles was peculiarly ...”

“... Cheney conceded, ‘but the most plentiful source of affordable energy in the country.’ Philip Clapp, president of the US National Environmental Trust, denounced Cheney’s plan as ‘an across-the-board attack on the environment’. Europeans began calling Bush the ‘Toxic Texan’. Scientists have all but unanimously condemned the new US ...”

“... included her aunt, Sarah Siddons, her father, Charles, and her uncle, the great tragedian John Philip Kemble, Fanny herself was deeply ambivalent towards the theatre. She first aspired to be a writer rather than an actress; and it was only when the family faced bankruptcy that the latest Kemble was swiftly prepared for the stage. As the manager and ...”

“... elder’s decline. The succession was once again secure. In 1947, when Princess Elizabeth married Philip of Greece, who is, like her, a great-great-grandchild of Victoria, it put yet another set of cousins, the Mountbattens, into position to steer the monarchy into the next reign. There were expeditions to Germany after the war by British agents, including ...”

“... end up producing a remarkable self-portrait. Though he had intended to preface the letters with a short history of their family, recollection soon faltered. Little more than a year separated the two oldest James children, but as far as Henry could remember, William had been ‘always round the corner and out of sight’ – so in ‘advance’ of his younger ...”

“... Literary History (2004) seemed to rate Prynne’s work above that of the ‘national monument’ Philip Larkin, John Carey reliably set up the easy symbolic row in the Sunday Times; the other papers, and the Today programme, pitched in predictably. Yet the result, interestingly and perversely, was to establish Prynne as the most significant alternative to ...”

“... of Spartan diplomacy plenty of ammunition for his own campaign against garrulity. When King Philip II of Macedon sought to intimidate the Spartan leadership by declaring that ‘If I invade Laconia, I shall turn you out,’ their reply was a simple ‘If’. The laconic riposte is a pivot or judo throw that makes use of an opponent’s superior weight ...”

“... Delaware seems really to be a neat updating of the past, an amiable new cousin for Lew Archer and Philip Marlowe. Binyon is impressed by Chandler, although he thinks Marlowe is a ‘romanticised and to a certain extent sentimentalised’ version of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade; a little impatient with Macdonald, too cerebral and meaningful for his taste ...”

“... vision. The present Oxford edition is to be followed by a new Cambridge edition, supervised by Philip Brockbank, and, it is rumoured, by a revised New Arden. For modern editors the issue of whether to modernise has been replaced, for reasons that are in part commercial and expedient, by the issue of how to modernise. Here Wells has many very valuable ...”

“... there must be an element of strangeness and exoticism in his work. You could call Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick Jewish writers, but they are also American writers. Singer never attempts to present a Gentile sensibility; in this whole volume there are hardly any Gentiles and only one with more than a walk-on part. The stories fall into three ...”

“... bloggers clamoured to interview and in some cases canonise her. Heti has been called the heir to Philip Roth, or to Joan Didion, and the literary equivalent of the filmmaker Lena Dunham or the songwriter Frank Ocean, who astonished the luridly heterosexual R’n’B scene last year by recording love songs addressed to his boyfriend. But what if she’d just ...”