“... it was 1981. It is difficult to react to Savage Grace without sounding like either Savonarola or Lord Longford. Some kind of moral judgment seems to be called for. No aesthetic judgment is possible anyhow, because this is one of those un-books composed of letters and statements by friends, acquaintances and witnesses. Presumably the statements were taped and ...”

“... wives and a student or two (and one student’s mother), and trying to write a book on James Buchanan, the 15th President of the United States, a Pennsylvanian who sought at (almost) all costs to keep the South in the Union. But then Alf was doing these things before and (presumably) after the Ford years too; what happened only in the Ford ...”

“... force a rose from the sand. It’s a big, bold blowsy note to open on, and not at all untypical. James Merrill, a poet of some breeding and considerable refinement, once remarked, in his essay ‘On Literary Tradition’, that ‘it’s a bit snotty to nudge the reader too obviously with references to Virgil or Eliot’, but Walcott remains an unashamed ...”

“... represented seemed ridiculous, ‘a bundle of inconsistent whims and affectations’ according to Lord Macaulay. No longer daring, merely trashy with a disturbing sense of something sexual and transgressive, Strawberry Hill embodied everything the Victorians despised about their Georgian grandparents. The contents, many of which are now in museums around the ...”

“... had been well and truly forked off their lives. With the notable exceptions of Magnus Mills and James Kelman, most British writers don’t make a habit of writing about what’s at the centre of most people’s lives. And I don’t mean sex: that’s peripheral, like God. The last great English novel about work, about its anxieties, distortions and ...”

“... rights. The tough guys of Chartism are here as well. From Manchester there is the twice imprisoned James Leach, whose Stubborn Facts from the Factories was milked by Engels for his Condition of the Working Class in England (Leach ended up in the 1850s as a soda-water manufacturer). Also from Manchester is the argumentative Reginald Jones Richardson, another ...”

“... that, his fears dispelled, he now shares our rejoicing in eternal life, the gift of that Risen Lord who here on earth he did not yet know.That’s one way to do it. In a valedictory poem published in the LRB (6 February 1986), Clive James made a similar point, though less unctuously:A bedside manner in your graveyard ...”

“... isn’t like that,’ they’re off the hook. 20 February. We’re gradually assembling a class: James Corden, who’s plump and funny and at the audition entirely takes charge; Sacha Dhawan, an Asian boy from Manchester who complains that all he’s ever offered these days are Muslim terrorists or Afghan refugees; Jamie Parker, who is to play Scripps the ...”

“... professor of psycho-physiology at the University of Geneva, friend of William James (and later Carl Jung) and enthusiastic debunker of putatively occult phenomena. Since the late 1880s Flournoy, whose deceptively chivalrous, self-effacing manner concealed a penetrating forensic intelligence, had eagerly sought a medium on whom to test his ...”

“... Justice rival ancient ROME;/Let NERO’s Vices meet with NERO’s Doom,/And speed’ly call King JAMES from Exile Home.’ Cookson spent a winter in Newgate Prison.Using a loathed historical or literary figure as a stand-in for an unpopular contemporary one was a favourite trick of early modern writers who wanted to print sedition and get away with it ...”

“... he forged a valuable connection with a fellow well-educated privateer, the son of Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. By the end of the 16th century, Essex had been tried and executed for treason, but Donne had a job as Egerton’s secretary, a place in his household and every prospect of a successful career at court.And then a cataclysm: he fell ...”

“... Nor were her artistic interests confined to Shakespeare: among those the countess patronised were James Thomson, John Gay and George Frideric Handel (of whom she painted a portrait), all of them occasional guests at the Ashley-Cooper family seat, St Giles House, at Wimborne St Giles in Dorset.My interest was much piqued by the fact that I knew the Wimborne St ...”

“... in the memorial street-furniture of the Grace gates that open onto the élite end of the ground at Lord’s. There was a time in the middle of the last century when that same Lord’s was on its uppers, with little or no idea how to stage matches that people might pay to see; the MCC couldn’t any longer raise the ...”

“... imply a social practice which it offers to articulate. So it is misleading to say that Bloom is a Lord of Misrule, as if the phrase referred to a social or public role he could be said to play. Putting these two ideas together, Parrinder reads Ulysses as a realistic novel, complete with characters and plot. He thinks Bloom a pretty solid citizen – ‘No ...”

“... of the world of today. Peter Pringle, formerly of the Sunday Times, now of the Observer, and James Spigelman, with civil service experience inside Gough Whitlam’s Government in Australia, have put together a remarkably well-informed, coherent and readable survey of this vast territory, clear and simple enough for the absolute beginner and yet full of ...”