“... forms’ but sterile imitators of those forms. To argue that Donald Barthelme, Ronald Sukenick, William Gaddis and company belong to some contemporary American avant-garde is to rationalise the fact that they have no audience. Karl cites as instances of writers misunderstood in their day the case of Melville, condemned to an obscure life as a customs ...”

“... finding a place for transcendent values, must be the pursuit of English novelists.’ It is William Golding who comes top here: he has ‘wed his sense of a transcendent evil and good to the fully felt social novel that the English have constructed in their great tradition’. Few people will dissent, I imagine, from this rating of Mr Golding. It must ...”

“... important friends were wealthy men with a taste for the arts – his neighbour Uvedale Price, Sir William Hamilton, Britain’s ambassador at Naples, and the collector Charles Townley. By the mid-l780s Knight moved in the liberal, not to say liberated Whig circles that had Charles James Fox as a hero, and ancient Athens as an inspiration. Knight’s first ...”

“... Salisbury’. Some other recent world-histories have taken a stand against Euro-centrism, notably William McNeill’s A World History (1971) and J.M. Roberts’s The Hutchinson History of the World (1976). In this regard, Mr Thomas is a self-conscious reactionary. He will have none of what he calls ‘well-intentioned complaints about the parochiality’ of ...”

“... of making ‘daily life itself a dignity and a sufficiency’ was to some extent prefigured by William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, which, like The Maximus Poems, explores the historical layers and quotidian rituals of an average American town. Olson differs from Williams, however, in his emphasis on his own participation in the life of Gloucester. The ...”

“... rights. From time to time, both Democrats and Republicans have claimed him as their own. In 1992, William Jefferson Clinton predictably played the Jefferson card, only to be trumped by Ronald Reagan in his speech to the Republican Convention. Parodying the rebuke which Lloyd Bentsen had delivered to Dan Quayle four years previously, Reagan mocked his own ...”

“... conspiracy theory about ‘billionaire Hungarian Jewish financier George Soros’ seeking to flood Christian Europe with Muslim refugees ‘to create a borderless world that is subservient to capitalism’ as ‘not entirely without credence’. There are substantial political differences between these actors, but they share the fundamental belief – crucial ...”

“... is ‘perhaps allied with religion, perhaps a mystic practice and possibly just another form of Christian Science or plain Hubbardian nonsense’. The following year, embracing what he called the ‘religious angle’, he opened the first church of Scientology in Los Angeles. The electro-psychometer was no longer used as a diagnostic tool but became instead ...”

“... the endless gadgets, and the need to clean them or tidy them away. We had come a long way from William Morris’s thinking on household objects, that one should keep nothing that is neither useful nor beautiful, and our house, in the middle of our street, was testament to the ugliness of half-arsed consumption, a Bedlam of miniature wants. Storage ...”

“... In July​ 1657 William Wood, a young immigrant to Maryland, was paddling along a creek of the Patuxent River when he found a body floating in the water. Dragging the corpse to land, he discovered it was Harry Gouge, a servant of John Dandy’s, whose watermill Wood had just left. He fetched Dandy, who came with two other men ...”

“... embracing ‘as many meanings as possible, that is, the most difficult meaning’. The young William Empson, who had been reading Graves for some while, adapted this insight for Seven Types of Ambiguity, which became one of the founding books of modern literary criticism; Riding later took him to task for stealing the idea. Close reading later got itself ...”

“... and runs riot; and there is also a stubborn element, a tough obstinacy.’ According to William Lyon Phelps, of Yale, in his Essays on Russian Novelists (1911), ‘your true Russian’ is notable for humility, love of theory, paralysis of the will, and a complete lack of ‘the healthy moderation of the Anglo-Saxon’. What, Phelps asks, is the ...”

“... the streets. After the event, radicals took Bellingham to their hearts. At his public execution William Cobbett, looking out from his cell window (he was in for political libel), ‘saw the half-horrified countenances’ of the crowd, the ‘mournful tears’ running down their faces and ‘heard the unanimous blessings’. He ascribed this to their ...”

“... described the moon as ‘sublimely still, and beautifully pale!’ In ‘On Bamborough Castle’, William Lisle Bowles praises a sublime ruin in lines that shake up Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth with a dash of Mary Robinson: Ye holy Towers that shade the wave-worn steep, Long may ye rear your aged brows sublime, Though, hurrying silent by, relentless ...”

“... falling into contempt with the people.’ Taxes were high and times were bad, and journalists like William Cobbett were radicalising popular opinion by lambasting ‘Old Corruption’. Parliament, Cobbett stormed, was ruining the nation it no longer represented. An oligarchy of aristocrats and financiers, having hijacked the Commons by means of electoral ...”