“... ongoing projects elsewhere: Jean-Marie Le Pen and Umberto Bossi, for example, or Ian Paisley and John Hume, who are merely adding a third Parliamentary seat to those they already hold at Westminster and in the Northern Ireland Assembly. A number of MEPs first achieved celebrity in other fields: Dana, the Irish Eurovision popstar, Michael Cashman, one-time ...”

“... his first book, from 1958, and republished it in 2001, with an introduction by his friend John Ashbery.* Schuyler is first and last a poet, but the other books shed interesting light on the poetry. ‘For readers of his poetry, the idea of the Diary of James Schuyler might almost seem like too much of a good thing,’ begins Nathan Kernan’s ...”

“... steals The Magnificent Seven not through hat-waving and underplaying, but because he laid siege to John Sturges to persuade him to increase the size of his role, and was charming and animated on-screen while everyone else was busy being dour. Charles Bronson and James Coburn were underplaying each other into inanimacy; Brynner was playing Gary Cooper. McQueen ...”

“... are only the steam which obscures the Mirror of Truth.’ Such is Fish’s description of John Milton, the most obstinately argumentative of all English poets, the most heroically strenuous in matters of the mind, the indefatigable compiler of arguments and corroborative materials, whose watchword, all his life, was ‘freedom’. In an age when the ...”

“... Babylon, a utopian London of the future and elsewhere. It’s a shame that Spufford never read John Masefield’s Box of Delights: I think he’d have liked it; and I’d like to read what he might have to say about it. The Story of the Amulet was number one in a list of the Top Ten Children’s Books of All Time (a silly notion, but appealing ...”

“... anniversary of a school that one of Luther’s followers wrested away from the monastery of St John in 1529 and renamed the Johanneum. Great figures of the German Enlightenment had taught or studied there; C.P.E. Bach and Telemann had been music masters during the 18th century. All this is to make clear that my image of my father before I knew him is of a ...”

“... as those middling public figures who were also important to the history of Tudor literature: John Heywood, Sir Thomas Elyot, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, ‘writers who in one way or another tried to come to terms with the experience of writing under a despotic monarch’. Walker’s strength is that he understands and engages intimately with the ...”

“... with proper games. In Stryker’s Run, for example, you controlled a character called Commander John Stryker, who had to convey an urgent top-secret message from one futuristic army base to another. What this meant, in practice, was running along past a monotonous scrolling backdrop of uniform mountains, shooting any enemy soldiers you encountered along the ...”

“... that such a tag would seem appropriate to describe any other poet of the 20th century. Why her? John Ashbery’s praise for Bishop as a ‘writer’s writer’s writer’, whose work ‘inspires in writers of every sort’ an ‘extraordinarily intense loyalty’, seems apt. And Ashbery knew that to say such a thing might be to pay ‘an ambiguous ...”

“... of Ceres’ womb, that her reaper-lovers had got upon her – to suit their double-columned books. John Barleycorn must die a second death, when bankers rule, as Spengler shows, till Caesar comes. Jones’s skills have not exactly deserted him: there is still the historical knowledge, the talent for allusion and association, and some distinctive ...”

“... American writing that have flourished and endured. Wolff sidestepped Postmodern elders such as John Barth, Robert Coover, Guy Davenport, William Gass, Harry Mathews, Paul Metcalf, Gilbert Sorrentino, Ronald Sukenick and Paul West, as well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William Vollmann and David Foster Wallace. None ...”

“... ruin of 20th-century literature, Ezra Pound’s Cantos.’ There is a remarkable brief piece on John Huston’s film The Misfits, and the tone changes entirely for two writers who clearly matter a great deal to Coetzee: Beckett and Celan. This is how we learn of ‘the distinctive prose that Beckett, using French models in the main, though with Jonathan ...”

“... individual psalms have been put, the detailed Christian exegeses of everyone from St Augustine to John Donne (and only very rarely the Jewish exegeses of Rashi and Avraham ibn Ezra), or even – except where there are specific references – other passages in the Bible. (This is contrary to Jewish tradition, which tends to pile up citations and defer to the ...”

“... was incarcerated in an asylum though never charged with the murders. Other Jewish suspects were John Pizer, a shoemaker known as ‘Leather Apron’; Severin Klosowski alias George Chapman; Michael Ostrog, described by a police investigator as ‘a mad Russian doctor and convict, and unquestionably a homicidal maniac’; and Joseph Isaacs. A few brief ...”

“... Richard III was killed at the Battle of Bosworth, the younger, Richard of York, was taken to St John’s Abbey in Colchester, where he worked as a bricklayer. The book is almost as extraordinary a production as the story it tells. It is garnished with the usual scholarly apparatus of notes and bibliography, and much of the time pursues apparently rational ...”