“... aesthetic is not, as many have thought and as Davie had feared, an oxymoron. It was after all John Calvin who clothed Protestant worship with the sensuous grace, and necessarily the aesthetic ambiguity, of song; and who that has attended worship in a French Calvinist church can deny that – over and above whatever religious experience he may or may not ...”

“... screen of hysteria blots out the folded hemlocks.’ It was decades later that poets such as John Ashbery or Paul Muldoon helped Anglophone poetry to a convincing use of Surrealist licence for its own ways and meanings. In any case, at the end of the Thirties Gascoyne himself had effectively abandoned Surrealism, and with it ‘The Rites of ...”

“... of the inauguration of an academic programme in October 1895, in two rented rooms in what is now John Adam Street. Nor is it unprecedented for someone who has run the School to write about it. One can point to the austere history of the LSE’s foundation by Sir Sydney Caine, or to what Dahrendorf calls ‘William Beveridge’s intriguing London School of ...”

“... Laura Gottschalk in the American magazine Fugitive. Graves had entered into correspondence with John Crowe Ransom, a Fugitive contributor, some years previously, and he wrote at once expressing his admiration. Ransom cautioned Graves in his reply that Laura Riding – she had in the interim cut loose from her first husband – was ‘very fine ...”

“... Eliot in the Houghton Library; Tennyson’s In Memoriam; Lyndall Gordon’s Eliot’s Early Years; John Mayer’s T.S. Eliot’s Silent Voices; Laforgue’s Hamlet, Mélanges posthumes, Le Concile féerique, and ‘Esthét-ique’; Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature; Maeterlinck’s essay ‘Silence’; Boswell’s Johnson; the OED; Paradise ...”

“... generation but he was doomed never to succeed. Partly it was because he wasn’t clubbable: as John Biffen, an admirer, noted sadly, he was ‘devastatingly self-contained’. But, far more, it was the speech that had put him beyond the pale, not only because of the allegations of racism which dogged him for ever after but because the Parliamentary élite ...”

“... similar to that of many recent liberals writing in the analytical tradition, such as Brian Barry, John Rawls and Charles Larmore. These writers argue that, by their nature, conceptions of the good – theocratic, secularist, vegan, carnivorous, lesbian, polygamous, socialist, libertarian or whatever – give us insufficient reason to conclude that any one of ...”

“... working classes, ancestors of the Decent Joker who is or was New Zealand’s Gianduja or John Q. Public) and the disreputable, who came so rapidly to provide the neo-Britain with a structure. His history is populist in that he celebrates its raw vitality, as in the forceful rhetoric of his two last sentences: ‘A booming, burgeoning ...”

“... that his play-acting nature became a running joke in his movies. ‘You’re just not convincing, John,’ Grace Kelly tells him in To Catch a Thief, ‘You’re like an American character in an English movie. You just don’t talk the way an American tourist ought to talk.’ In Suspicion a crime writer laughs at him: ‘Look at the expression on his ...”

“... to the standard of Einstein or Jeffrey Archer in this galaxy alone. So where are they all? When John Logie Baird invented television, he also invented a microwave messaging system broadcast through interstellar space. For forty years, programmes like I Love Lucy and Rawhide and Dynasty have been spearheading planet Earth’s attempt to get in ...”

“... by his translation of the Austrian folk tale Bambi, which carried a moist Foreword from John Galsworthy.) This was the literary bridge that carried Chambers from relative hackdom on the Daily Worker to pre-eminence at the Stalinist flagship of letters, The New Masses. Indeed it was his usefulness and ability in this department that got him ...”

“... could order the fragments in her own way; but even this seems rather too programmatic, a bit too John Cage. It is certainly better to dip into the book than to read it through – one of the many endearing things about Pessoa is that he makes conscientiousness seem silly – and the fragments should be read as a series of bulletins, without assuming one ...”

“... Davy, and lay on his innocent life the burdens of their love, need or cupidity, are his father, John Chadwick, his mother, Dawn Chadwick, and their old friend (or acceptable enemy, depending how you read it), William Nelson. These people are all failures, all refugees, all victims. Chadwick is a failed stockbroker. Nelson is a man in what used to be known ...”

“... kinds of series come from computer science, which has two parents, if we are to name names. One is John von Neumann, whose team built the first electronic digital computer. The other was Alan Turing, who pioneered the logical theory of computation. It would be quite wrong to characterise the one man as applied, the other as pure. Turing was fascinated by all ...”

“... that these rebellions amount to much. They manifest themselves as the high seriousness of trivia (John Baldessari’s alphabetical list of the contents of his files of movie stills); as Native American bluster and vanity; as halfbaked intellectualism; above all, as the intoning of feminist and other contemporary cultural pieties. (Yvonne Rainer: ‘At this ...”