“... shirt, was alone at the bar. A couple of non-performative locals, supporting players, drank at a small table beside a wall of boxing memorabilia and photographs of scenes from the lost London. The subversive lock-in was migratory, coming down the Lea Valley and heading for the river. The key point of difference with the ethical profit-spreaders in Great ...”

“... total lack of formal education. So she started writing about the law instead, in pieces about the Stephen Ward and Lady Chatterley trials for Esquire, Jack Ruby for Life, the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial for the Saturday Evening Post. ‘The law, the workings of the law, the daily application of the law to people and situations, is an essential element in a ...”

“... was first published in the Morning Chronicle in March 1812, anonymously. The poem caused a small uproar at the time, but when he re-published it in February 1814 under his own name (among a group of short poems he printed with The Corsair) the effect was explosive. The ‘meaning’ of the poem had changed with the change of format and its attendant ...”

“... which Oxford-modern resolves by printing ‘busil’est’ – an emendation duly defended in Stephen Orgel’s excellent single-play Oxford version2 (‘my thoughts of Miranda are most active when I am busiest at my work’). The Oxford-original gives ‘busielest’ as what the compositor or possibly the scribe misread or wrongly divided in an attempt ...”

“... if given the chance. In a society apparently so alienated from its government, it seemed that a small well-placed shove from the outside might bring the whole regime tumbling down.There were a couple of flaws in this argument. The one Benjamin Tromly focuses on is the fact that the Russians eager to stay in the West were not democracy-lovers who had ...”

“... man. Most readers assume she was praising Johnson’s sober, rational side; Leslie Stephen, writing in 1878, went so far as to commend Tetty’s penetrative ‘good sense’ for discerning the same quality in Johnson, despite his ‘grotesque appearance’. But if we take Tetty’s ‘sensible’ to mean – as in this period it certainly could ...”

“... that would most help to make her legal case for separation’. Whatever she told her lawyer, Stephen Lushington, it had a galvanising effect. From that point, he recalled, ‘I considered a reconciliation impossible.’ Whether it was the incest, the sodomy, adultery, drugs or Byron’s episodes of apparent near psychosis, it shook Lushington to the ...”

“... John Huston to come out to Hollywood in the summer of 1950 to write about his adaptation of Stephen Crane’s novel The Red Badge of Courage. She just stuck with the project from beginning to end. If you know how to report in a certain way, by seeing people and circumstances as you might see them if you were writing a novel, then access becomes a daily ...”

“... the localised warming effect that any building has on the upper layers of the permafrost; only a small minority ascribe the problems to planetary climate shifts. Even the 2009 Greenpeace Russia report, from which I have taken my figures, strikes a cautious note, saying only that global climate change must ‘surely have played a role’. The hesitation ...”

“... Club, precursor of International Pen, but finds its literary milieu ‘alarmingly refined’ (Stephen Spender lectures on Poetic Drama, ‘loathing the suburbs’). She gives up the Daily Mail and starts reading the New Statesman. In 1936 her father dies unexpectedly. At 26 Jean has £300 a year, rent from the family home, and a portfolio of stocks and ...”

“... role in history, or at any rate in political and military history, which is the preserve of small elites: people do not make history – they make a living.’ Did the masses clamour for the world wars in which they were to be slaughtered? he asks rhetorically. This question might have a different answer, of course, if one substituted ‘revolution and ...”

“... A. Cohen ‘by and large appalling tosh’; the critical practice of Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt is, he says, ‘piss-poor’, while the former is so inaccurate (not that Cunningham is without his blunders) that she gives us ‘history as shitty-slop’. Yet he wants readers to be tactful as well as tactile, which means having what Bunyan ...”

“... Frank was being held. The mob handcuffed the warden, took Frank, and drove him through several small towns on the way to Phagan’s hometown, Marietta. Carson’s song ‘Dear Old Oak in Georgia’ celebrates the tree from which Frank was hanged: ‘Two years we have waited and tales we have listened to,’ he sang. ‘But the boys of old Georgia had to ...”

“... of The Norton Anthology of English Literature’, published in Critical Inquiry in 2009, quotes Stephen Greenblatt’s emails to his Norton co-editors, telling them that Damrosch aimed to include ‘many texts by Welsh, Irish and Scottish writers, to show that multiculturalism, as it were, begins at home’.But in England itself it was too often taken for ...”

“... songs of Gerald Finzi, Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth, Gurney, Ernest Farrar. (The baritone Stephen Varcoe is unsurpassed in this repertoire.) I have but to hear the dark opening bars of Finzi’s ‘Only a Man Harrowing Clods’ to dissolve in sticky war nostalgia and an engorged, unseemly longing for things unseen.Yet something about my fixation has ...”