“... searching for the kindness of strangers on Clapham Common. The Director-General of the BBC, Sir John Birt, was knighted by Tony Blair and worked with and befriended Mandelson at London Weekend Television in the early Eighties. LWT executives became millionaires when a share option lottery in 1993 fell well for them. (Among the lucky LWT ...”

“... oiks, like Peter Wright (Bishop’s Stortford High School) and, more recently, David Shayler (John Hampden Grammar, High Wycombe). The latest, Richard Tomlinson, doesn’t quite fit – he got a scholarship from a state primary school to a ‘prestigious public school’. The motives for whistleblowing can be various: high principle, personal ...”

“... the cause had been a chorister two years younger than Byron who had been his lover at Cambridge. John Edleston (commemorated in his poetry as ‘Thyrza’) moved to London when his voice broke to take up a position as a clerk in a mercantile firm. They hadn’t seen each other for a while, when Edleston wrote to Byron, asking for help with finding a new ...”

“... influence on his early fiction, however, was Raymond Roussel, to whose work he was introduced by John Ashbery in 1956: Roussel’s ‘sovereign genius’, Mathews later declared, ‘demonstrated to me that psychology was a dispensable fashion, that the moral responsibilities of writing did not lie in a respect of subject matter, and that the writing of prose ...”

“... herd.’ If you cite this sort of passage from Nietzsche (or similar ones in William James or John Dewey) in order to argue that what we call ‘the search for objective truth’ is not a matter of getting your beliefs to correspond better and better to the way things really are, but of attaining intersubjective agreement, or of attempting to cope better ...”

“... Humiliation if they confessed they had not read Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. As his translator John Hoole put it in 1763, ‘Of all Authors, so familiarly known by name to the generality of English readers as Tasso, perhaps there is none whose works have been so little read.’ Hoole did much to change that: his translation – staid, Drydenical, but ...”

“... Leatitia Hawkins (whose memoirs of the Johnson circle would revisit material her father, Sir John Hawkins, had treated in his 1787 Life of Samuel Johnson), and all about a past Queeney would rather forget. Although the characters do things (fart, masturbate, cross-dress) that Boswell never told us about and fail to do things (persuade us of their charm ...”

“... redemption, and include the news that Effie Bawn was the nicest person to live in Glasgow since St John Ogilvie. But before that day, as a reformed woman, Netta would rinse her clothes in Barlinnie Prison, for other niceness, and other reform. She incited a crowd to riot, and was said to be behind the suffragette burning of Leuchars Station. Netta held young ...”

“... realism’, it seems a plausible clue to the relationship of Kafka to Flaubert, or of Kurosawa to John Ford, but will be found a clueless guide to Proust and his relationship to a single precursor. We are advised by Anderson to think hard about Jameson’s suggestion that we may ‘grow new organs to expand our sensoria and our bodies to some new, as yet ...”

“... Yet hybridity of this kind is neither new nor surprising. In Modern Asian Art (1998), John Clark places it in perspective with a series of diachronic case-studies of artistic Modernism, ranging through prewar Japan and India, Revolutionary China and South-East Asia in the Eighties and Nineties. Clark warns against the ‘acceptance of a type of ...”

“... extend the anthology’s reach beyond what Ricks terms ‘our precious stones from Land’s End to John o’Groats, leave alone the emerald of Ireland’. On the other hand, the editorial policy excludes ‘the British Empire or the British Commonwealth’ through a historical Catch-22. Post-colonial poets are refused entry on the separate-but-equal principle ...”

“... difficult relationships between the privatised companies will add considerably to the problems. John Uff, the chairman of the Southall Inquiry, says that the privatised rail industry is unable to deal effectively with inter-company issues, and that research and development projects open lines of conflict between the commercial interests of different parties ...”

“... boat. This time, however, it was not the thought of pretty girls that diverted him but his friend John Evelyn’s ‘pretty’ new book ‘against Solitude’. Evelyn’s Publick employment and an active life prefer’d to solitude, published in 1667, was written to refute Sir George Mackenzie’s 1665 work, A Moral Essay, Preferring Solitude to Public ...”

“... her life. Dogville is structured in chapters, like Breaking the Waves, but also has a narrator (John Hurt) who supplies a mocking commentary on the town and its hypocrisies. Grace is found by an aspiring young writer called Tom (Paul Bettany), who is engaged in an inquiry into Moral Rearmament. Tom believes that the people of Dogville have no sense of ...”

“... unfortunates’. These unfortunates include not just Jerry but various friends – Haydar, Ranjit, John Wong – who share his dismay at ‘this fucking place’. Like Jerry, Ranjit – whose family fled the subcontinent to escape British imperialism – has had enough of starvation wages and petty discrimination: he’s saving up to return to India. In ...”