“... Wars and battles: these words, appearing prominently in the titles of two of the books under consideration, might give the impression that poetry, or criticism, or the criticism of poetry, is a belligerent business. It doesn’t stop with the book titles, either: the chapter on Edna Longley in W.J. McCormack’s short and contentious study of Irish cultural debate requires us to attend to ‘the reaction from Ulster’, and sums it up thus: ‘Fighting or Writing?’ This humorously echoes the famous anti-Home Rule poster with its caption, ‘Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right,’ while referring specifically to the critical reception of the ‘Field Day’ pamphlets (nine to date), which deal with questions – thorny questions – of identity and cultural heritage in Ireland ...”

“... has anyone else, much, in the 36 years since Shaw’s death, except the predicted biographers. St John Ervine skimmed their scandalous cream in his ill-tempered centenary life in 1956. Other scholars have browsed them for background material, notably Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie in their book The Fabians. But it has taken until now for any publisher to be ...”

“... When Joe Orton was in Tangier, he noted down the following exchange: ‘You like to be fucked or fuck?’ he said. ‘I like to fuck, wherever possible,’ I said. He leaned across and said in a confidential tone: ‘I take it.’ ‘Do you?’ I said. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘up to the last hair.’ ‘You speak very good English,’ I said. Though Orton is aroused, his attention is undeflected ...”

“... throughout the whole Langlandian tradition. ‘Bee war of gyle in borough,’ says the doggerel of John Ball in 1381. The peasants of Hurepoix – who saw their share of the land inexorably reduced by town buyers, from 40 per cent to around a quarter in the century after 1550 – could have had ‘gyle in borough’ tattoed on their hearts. The poor folk of ...”

“... in 1998 – iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad – Jobs had a few lost years. In 1983, he recruited John Sculley, president of Pepsi-Cola, as Apple’s CEO. ‘Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water,’ he asked Sculley, ‘or do you want a chance to change the world?’ Isaacson dismisses Sculley, claiming he perceived ‘in Jobs ...”

“... or less confused in 18th-century Europe, when townspeople flocked to watch the oculists perform. John Taylor was the superstar of sight restoration, taking his show around England, Germany, Italy and France: many purblind celebrities would be subjected to his oratorical preambles (I quote from one above) before the scalpel plunged in. How far did Taylor’s ...”

“... poetry, neither of which he knows anything about. He suffers anxiety attacks, pops pills, reads John Ashbery and sits in the park, where he fails to work. As in a video game, it’s not exactly what happens that counts: what’s important is how deeply you’re drawn into the world of the game, how transfixed you become. Adam is drawn deeply into his new ...”

“... Marian frame – as an illustration of a popular story from the Apocrypha, which has the infant John the Baptist, in flight from Herod’s executioners, come across Christ on his flight into Egypt. Though never was Egypt like this. Maybe the trigger for the temple of boulders was a line from the Song of Songs: ‘My dove in the clefts of rocks (in ...”

“... whether the night sky, riven with fire and the beams of searchlights, is more like a Turner or a John Martin. Further down St James’s Street, on the opposite pavement from where a club that is more or less Brooks’s has been bombed, ‘a group of progressive novelists in firemen’s uniform were squirting a little jet of water into the morning room ...”

“... sources where previously the documentation stopped in the 19th century. The present editor, John Simpson, explains that in some cases ‘quotations formerly published in the Dictionary have been silently omitted.’ This could be construed as censorship or ‘deletion’, but plainly it is being done in the interests of balance. No dictionary can be ...”

“... bought drink for other soldiers. She also paid 20d a day for the training of ‘her’ soldier, John Trahern, who took her place in the Hereford militia. For Jeffreys, the disturbances must at first have seemed remote: London figured primarily in her books as a place of business, and a place to buy whalebone, writing paper and other luxuries. In October ...”

“... Walsingham gave to Sidney and Languet and other terror-stricken Protestants in Paris. Perhaps, as John Cooper conjectured in his 2011 Life of Walsingham, such scenes were literally indescribable in diplomatic correspondence, their details committed instead for maximum security to the memory of couriers who conveyed the news to London. While the events of St ...”

“... and works impressed him: Honegger’s Pacific 231, Ravel’s The Child and the Enchanted Objects, John Alden Carpenter’s Skyscrapers. He felt he could outmodernise them, but misfired with his opera The Fiery Angel, which concerns demonic possession in Renaissance Cologne. Between the first and second drafts, it became the noisiest opera ever written ...”

“... them double agents, which had been MI5’s speciality in both world wars. Yet, according to Sir John Harding, governor of Cyprus in the 1950s: As far as ill-treatment, rough treatment on capture, I think that it is something which inevitably does happen. After all if you’ve got troops or police who are engaged in an anti-terrorist operation and they’ve ...”

“... any rate materially superior. Yan Fu took on board almost everything he found there: Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Montesquieu, the notion of impartial justice, patriotism. Until then, however, prejudice and hostile stereotypes persisted. ‘The English,’ announced placards posted up in Canton just after the First Opium War, ‘are born and grow up in ...”