“... books. She also wrote poems (much less good than the novels) and studies of Mary Shelley and John Masefield, whose narrative verse she admired. She then had a protracted bust-up with Stanford, which had its origins in what was to prove the foundational crisis in her life. In late 1953 she was taking too much Dexedrine, which she used as an appetite ...”

“... procuring high-grade steel from Britain. But Congress wanted to facilitate local industry. Senator John Miller of California, a former general in the Union Army, argued in favour of ‘constructing American men-of-war from American material, by American workmen, to be manned by American seamen, and to be used in the service of the government of the United ...”

“... at least, some of the most thoughtful and independent observers would persuade us. One of them is John Felstiner, whose book about Neruda was reviewed in LRB a few weeks back by Christopher Reid.1 Felstiner some years ago wrote an essay that I for my part found arresting and persuasive, in which he argued – largely on the evidence of directions taken by ...”

“... profession and the other asylums of London (especially Hoxton) when necessary. Lamb’s brother John had urged him not to take on this task: it was typical of Lamb to say that he understood John’s reasons for saying this, and thought no less of him for it, while disregarding his advice. The history of the fate of insane ...”

“... at a circle of readers in London and New York. (He has evidently succeeded in that aim: the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has just bestowed on him its ‘Genius Award’ – $250,000 with no strings attached.) Edward Kamau Brathwaite is also familiar with that circle, having carried off a Cholmondley Award in this country and a ...”

“... discussion papers and now taken up by these two books is for a minister of culture. Norman St John-Stevas was Minister for the Arts and a cabinet minister, but the duality was, like a seat on the Arts Council, personal to him. When Mrs Thatcher sacked him, the minister for the arts resumed the status of a junior minister at the Department of Education and ...”

“... doubleness ministers to social vigilance, not to solitary complacency. In The Figure of Echo, John Hollander has recently unfolded a contrariety in Chapter 26 of the Book of Proverbs: Answer not a tool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit. Each of these ...”

“... aural shortcomings here are not an isolated instance in his work and bother even his admirers. For John Lucas, who admires Porter’s savage attacks on metropolitan manners, verbal clumsiness is simply the price to be paid for Porter’s fecundity and invention – the cost of weariness after years at the typewriter bashing the smoothies. For others perhaps ...”

“... testimony to the unsatisfactoriness of all the ways of referring to the most important and (pace John Vincent, who has been wonderfully at it again) the most interesting person pondered in the book. There is no one way that is neutral, or natural, or complete, of referring to Sir Oswald Mosley in this book, nor could there be. And if the difficulties of tact ...”

“... excellence. In taking this line he was opposing the one adopted by the overtly German-influenced John Christie, who argued that what Britain needed was a Volksoper – a People’s Opera – building on the spirit of popular cultural identity forged during the war. Christie shared with Keynes a horror of the crudely amateurish and folksy national art of the ...”

“... from the lift. When they begin, Butts is living with a lover named Eleanor Rogers but also seeing John Rodker, an aspiring writer who is chiefly known today for his activities as a publisher of deluxe editions: a portfolio of Fifteen Drawings by Wyndham Lewis (1919), Ara Vos Prec by Eliot (1920), and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) and Cantos 17-27 by Pound ...”

“... moral and physical welfare of the tropical traveller. No recent guide has surpassed the excellent John Hatt’s remarks on underwear in The Tropical Traveller (1982). Hatt insists that this ‘must be of pure cotton’ and urges a change of attitude, or perhaps a readjustment, for anyone foolish enough to hit the tropics wearing ‘the “jockey” style of ...”

“... fusions of images in their heads by declaring that the ‘walrus’ in ‘I Am The Walrus’ was John Lennon, and that ‘Sexy Sadie’ was the Maharishi; Darius spoke the words; Khusroo and Anil merely repeated. Since then Gautam had entered a pink-green world of innuendoes and monsters, culminating in his purchase of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band ...”

“... the camaraderie of the laboratory, for there is no experimental work. Which is why the career of John von Neumann, who did do new work, and is the nearest thing the book has to a hero, is not typical. When he wanted to build a computer at the Institute he met resistance: Harold Cherniss, a specialist in ancient Greek philosophy, became an Institute ...”

“... and which has institutionalised personal power in a way reminiscent of De Gaulle or Peron: St John Stevas’s phrase about Mrs. Thatcher – ‘a new Cromwell of the Right’ – says it well. And yet the question we find ourselves asking is not: how can the Opposition win? but: how can the Government possibly lose? When one is in the desert one cannot ...”