“... resistant when it comes to abandoning myths. To cite a parallel example, my friend and colleague, John Chilton, has proved conclusively that although the great Blues singer Bessie Smith died following a car accident, it was not because she was refused treatment by a white Southern hospital – a version that is still widely and emotionally cited. I have ...”

“... form of lawful socialism.’ This complaint over Frei’s victory may be contrasted with John Gunther’s enthusiasm in his reliable Inside Latin America (1967). ‘Chile came close to voting itself Communist in 1964 ... But Frei, who calls himself a Christian humanist, averted this by winning the Presidency against a Marxist candidate after a ...”

“... control of female sexuality, looms large in both movements. American fundamentalists like John Straton, writing in the Twenties, described the corrupting role of women in images strikingly similar to those to be found in the jeremiads of the Muslim militants. ‘The most sinister and menacing figure of our modern life is the ...”

“... of Western Orientalism and of Eastern Occidentalism, both of which Tagore confounded. Edward John Thompson (1886-1946) was then an educational missionary at the Wesleyan College at Bankura. He had published several volumes of verse, and was approaching proficiency in Bengali. After a brief meeting in Calcutta, Tagore invited him to visit him at his ...”

“... happens to contain a spelling mistake of his own: the fact that one of his American Modernists is John Ashbery, whose name Stead cannot spell, gives one little confidence in the quality of the information underlying these Modernist choices. Stead is a vigorous writer, and there are pages in this book that are stronger than my review suggests. But it is ...”

“... intellectual in politics’ in the sense in which that description applies, for instance, to John Stuart Mill (or even perhaps to Arthur Balfour). Brougham’s intellect could serve him superbly in political life, especially perhaps in the mastery of complex subjects displayed in some of his astonishing speeches. Yet the great 1828 speech on law ...”

“... the veil of illusion; such is Hamlet’s doctrine, not to be confounded with the cheap wisdom of John-a-Dreams, who through too much reflection, as it were a surplus of possibilities, never arrives at action. It may seem nasty, or pointless, or perhaps romantically wayward, to place these items alongside the rest of what has been said. Hamlet Closely ...”

“... In the early summer of 1931, as the storm centre of the century’s worst depression roared back towards a Germany where already 4.5 million people were out of work, the Nazi Party for the first time faced the fact that it might be elected to government. ‘Finance capitalism’, which they had been lambasting for 12 years, had got the country into just the mess they had predicted ...”

“... he speaks is crammed with lovely words that could refresh the written language. Though he worships John Clare, Longley does not follow Clare in using dialect, and yet there is at the heart of his imagination a similar shyness and gentleness, a finely humane outlook with an almost mystical texture and cherishing puzzlement. Like Clare, Longley has a special ...”

“... I refer to the first of these items as ‘Goldthorpe’ and to the second as ‘Halsey’. Both are productions of the Oxford (Social) Mobility Project, a large collaborative exercise which has operated from a base in Nuffield College since 1969. For a long while, politicians and other interested parties are likely to cite them as authoritative sources, but in order to evaluate what is being said, the reader must penetrate a thick layer of mind-boggling numerical tabulations and pseudo-vector diagrams to the egalitarian value schema which lies beneath ...”

“... herself seriously by falling in love with an English under-butler, was found a husband in Colonel John Campbell, a widowed brother-in-law of Dr Login, who had been placed in charge of Duleep in India and brought him up. Login owed his entire advancement to this connection, being invited to Court and given a knighthood. Yet good middle-class Lady Login was ...”

“... that is far in advance of political reality. Thus the translations of Frank O’Connor, John Montague and Thomas Kinsella point towards a national identity which is as yet not fully ratified by law and international treaty. This strong and enduring autochthonous tradition of translation is complemented by a more recent interest in translating ...”

“... 20 May, is the date of Kent’s arrest. Where else does he slip up? He mentions that Knight and John le Carré knew one another, but doesn’t see fit to add that le Carré – under his real name, David Cornwell – illustrated one or two of Knight’s post-war publications (e.g. Talking Birds, 1961): a not uninteresting detail in a story that includes ...”

“... end of my last page and safely preserved my Eastons as they were to me.’ When Dr Johnson charged John Donne with scoring a ne plus ultra in absurdity by likening a man to a pair of compasses, he hadn’t reckoned on Lisa Zeidner, who, in the space of only 15 lines, manages to compare a man’s penis to the soft, hot forehead of a sick child, to ice-cream ...”

“... strange forms which 20th-century Irish novels display from Joyce to Beckett to Flann O’Brien and John Banville. When the lack of freedom is viewed, on the other hand, as a structural defect, based on economic forces, then the novel tends to be much more dependent for its appeal upon the verisimilitude with which the social formation is registered. Even if ...”