“... Thatcherism which the present leadership of the Party obviously favours. The domination, since John Smith’s death, of the Party and its machine by people associated with the soft Left has, paradoxically, exposed it even more to bastard Thatcherism. The victory of the soft Left meant the vanquishing not just of the Bennite Left but also the Gaitskellite ...”

“... wan, sometimes wanton, according to the interplay between Humbert’s sentimentality and desire. John le Carré’s Perfect Spy, Magnus Pym, owes his training to a con man father. The only way for the child to know what is going on (Ricky Pym’s words and actions don’t tell him – on the contrary, they are monstrous mystifications) is to keep watch, to ...”

“... loss of her daughter – that fixed her reputation.I never met Didion or her husband, the novelist John Gregory Dunne, but in September 1974 I heard Didion speak one evening in the Branford College common room at Yale. Dunne was there as well, stepping in when her voice began to trail off. I was teaching a non-fiction seminar on Wednesday evenings that year ...”

“... and editors. Other leading figures also do both, including, in this country, Christopher Ricks and John Carey. But most critics in good repute don’t seem to want to edit, and wouldn’t be any good if they tried. The provocative element in McGann’s position for them will be his serious belief in the centrality of the role of the editor. He goes back to the ...”

“... against evils, and perhaps there is no easier business,’ Trollope said of the anti-slavery MP John Bright, a theatrical orator who couldn’t be bothered with political detail. Celebrating the Civil War as a triumph of freedom over slavery is equally easy. A few decades ago, US historians tried to complicate this heroic narrative. Guided at times by ...”

“... of his present views over those from earlier in his career. In editing the essays, his executor, John F. Callahan, took a similar approach. Only one of the 25 items in the revised reissue of Collected Essays (first published in 2003) that didn’t appear in Shadow and Act and its successor, Going to the Territory (1986), predates Ellison’s renunciation of ...”

“... viewed with dismay the lack of restraint and caution in O’Donovan Rossa’s violent rhetoric. John Devoy, one of the leaders of Clan na Gael, the main Irish nationalist organisation in America, believed, as Kenna writes, that O’Donovan Rossa ‘had given the British ample warning of his plans through a desire for notoriety and theatricality, thus ...”

“... his essay is full of admiration, and shows a deep acquaintance with his works. The critic Gerhard Joseph once suggested that Auden might have had in mind the old sense of ‘stupid’ as ‘stunned’ or ‘benumbed’ – as when Satan in Paradise Lost, momentarily struck as he gazes upon Eve, stands ‘Stupidly good, of enmity disarmed’. It was not ...”

“... crisis he used threats and lies to coerce the press into co-operation. His fixer, the sinister Joseph Ball, had the telephones of the anti-appeasement MPs tapped. When Eden resigned as foreign secretary in February 1938, Ball put it about that the real reason was that he was exhausted and could no longer cope with the job. Chamberlain founded the ...”

“... seemed to me quite like what you’re up to.GP: Did you ever come across another Peckham artist, John Latham?TP: Of course, of course, I know him well. Knew him well.GP: Did you talk to him much about books?TP: Like most artists I meet, we talked about money, women, publishers, things that are wrong in the world, the Royal Academy.GP: But he never belonged ...”

“... The pogrom in Limerick, which took place in 1904, was incited by the fiery preaching of Father John Creagh to the arch-confraternity: The Jews came to Limerick apparently the most miserable tribe imaginable ... but now they had enriched themselves and could boast of very considerable house property in the city. Their rags have been exchanged for ...”

“... thought encompassed the notion of degeneration but not extinction.) Some naturalists, such as John Ray, simply admitted they didn’t have all the answers. John Woodward of Gresham College reconciled the Flood with the emergence of fossils by imagining a slurry of water and soil that deposited different objects ...”

“... comfort, but a lot of it very attractive. I came to the reviews with no expert knowledge of what John Sutherland calls ‘the fiction industry’ and ‘the reviewing establishment’. His two excellent books, Fiction and the Fiction Industry (1978) and the recently published Best-Sellers *, have helped me greatly.Other People was published on 5 ...”

“... It could have been lifted from Down Cemetery Road, the 1964 BBC Monitor documentary presented by John Betjeman, in which Philip Larkin, a very different librarian-poet, bicycle clips firm around trouser bottoms, obligingly wheels his way into the damp monochrome of a country church.Prynne’s brief and unwanted celebrity followed the publication in 2004 of ...”

“... Converts, a chatty survey of literary and artistic converts to Catholicism in England from John Henry Newman to the Second Vatican Council. Catholic journalists like McDonagh have always doted over these prize catches, but it is a good moment to investigate the way converts change the religion they embrace. Before Palm Sunday this year, the New York ...”