“... Thus Ascherson joins the oddly-assorted, lively company of Primo Levi, Oliver Sacks, John Berger, Edward Said and Germaine Greer – but from a slippery starting-point: the journalist is a specialist in nothing. Sometimes he seems to know that only too well, and to underrate his own contribution. Calling for work on the growing power of an undemocratic state ...”

“... plausible account of the origin of Maurice – the moment of conception when, in the house of Edward Carpenter, the sage’s friend George Merrill touched him on the backside. But, as we have already noticed, Mrs Beauman never hesitates to correct Forster if his version of the facts conflicts with her intuitions; he can always be represented as slyly ...”

“... it, equip us to make a rational judgment. We may, for instance, conclude that the description of James Wait’s death in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ is verbally so close to the death scene of Forestier in Maupassant’s Bel Ami that the latter must have influenced the former; and if others agree, then something definite (and not uninteresting) has been ...”

“... common sense’ still alarms established authority – as witness recent experiences of Professors Edward Thompson and Michael Pentz with the BBC. At no point does Brecht suggest that ‘popular common sense’ is enough by itself. What he does try to show – repeatedly and variously in different plays – is that ordinary people are capable of learning the ...”

“... Master, whose name was F.H. Rawlins, (runner-up for the headmastership when Lyttelton’s Uncle Edward was appointed in 1905), rose at once from his stall. Above the echoing crepitations and showers of sparks exploding between the rows of boys, facing each other from their respectively decani and cantoris knifeboards, he pronounced anathema: ‘The boy who ...”

“... a corporate society. At Harvard, he was, at different times, an assistant and acolyte to William James and George Santayana, and he came to believe that reality was something one had to fight for, that personality and expertise had their parts to play, and that ‘psychology mattered in politics.’ He wanted to see what the papers were saying but also why ...”

“... are those who will never be able to bring themselves, even under the threat of Reagan, to want Edward Kennedy as President. Mosley did appreciate the existence, though not the nature, of the human craving to believe something. What he really offered to meet, though, was different: the human craving to believe in someone. (Not the satisfaction which looks ...”

“... sequel’, which is not an imitation but a prolongation – like Walter Scott’s or James Fenimore Cooper’s novel cycles, or Balzac’s Human Comedy. Both types are tied to market forces. Collections like To Be Continued: An Annotated Guide to Sequels (1995) and The Whole Story: 3000 Years of Sequels and Sequences (1996) attest to the ...”

“... world. In the secret services – just like Oxbridge colleges – it appears this didn’t apply. Edward Heath describes MI5 operatives as the sort of men who would follow people on the Underground because they were reading the Daily Mirror. Lords Carver, Beloff and Dacre – establishment figures, with hardly a pale pink political opinion between the three ...”

“... for details of the English dead at Agincourt. The herald hands over a paper, and the King reads: Edward, the Duke of York, the Earl of Suffolk, Sir Richard Ketly, Davy Gam, esquire; None else of name; and of all other men But five and twenty. The French have lost ten thousand, of whom all but sixteen hundred were persons of ‘blood and quality’. There is ...”

“... reader of novels. He disdained short fiction and didn’t read much non-fiction, unless it was Edward Gibbon or Darwin. I am nearly opposite in my tastes, but we did share our enthusiasms. Thom, for instance, thought Philip Roth was the cat’s miaow. I didn’t. ‘Try The Counterlife,’ Thom said. Which I did, and it dazzled me. Another time Thom said ...”

“... riverscape, townscape, and seascape. In Paterson, Williams included extracts from letters from Edward Dahlberg, Allen Ginsberg, and from a woman called Marcia Nardi, who had turned up in his surgery in Rutherford in the spring of 1942 with a sick son and a sheaf of poems. Williams liked these a great deal, and wrote to say so. He also tried to persuade his ...”

“... countries’ rulers. In his memoir, My Mission in Israel, 1948-51, America’s first Ambassador, James McDonald, quotes the rationale for US support of Israel that a ‘high Israeli official’ proposed to the Embassy in 1948: 1. The United States has a firm friend in the state of Israel, which is oriented toward the West politically and culturally and ...”

“... Parliament and involved riots and pamphlet wars; eventually, it led to such songs and poems as James Thomson’s ‘Rule, Britannia’ and Robert Burns’s ‘A Parcel of Rogues’. A digital search shows that the words ‘Scots’ and ‘Scotland’ occur nowhere in the London-published 1707 Affairs of State. This tells us something more important about ...”

“... about this undoubtedly American poet. He is the justified sinner whom we meet in the fiction of James Hogg. And he is the superman, the Stavrogin, whom we meet in the fiction of Dostoevsky: the antinomian hero bent both on power and mischief and on the blessedness of the meek, so that he’s Prince Myshkin too, and it’s hardly surprising that he should ...”