“... Brian Wilson over those of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set itself against disco wholeheartedly. Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen ...”

“... for instance, she provides a lively account of the intricate emotional manoeuvres performed by John Banks’s splendidly over-the-top costume drama The Island Queens (banned under Charles II in 1684, rewritten and rehabilitated under Anne as The Albion Queens, 1704), during which Mary and her victorious antitype Elizabeth enjoy the first of their many ...”

“... who cared greatly about her blonde, pink and sometimes overweight appearance – was pleased when John Holms told her she looked like ‘a something Queen Elizabeth’. The missing adjective was ‘Surbiton’, which she would not have liked, though she was capable of accepting far crueller truths about herself than most people could dream up for her. She ...”

“... in fact, alone; she may even be seen as the last in a recognisable English literary tradition. John Keats was the first great English poet to grow up in the London suburbs, and – aided by Leigh Hunt – to allow his work to speak for his true milieu. Browning’s aesthetic eccentricity might well be called suburbanity, the decision to keep his ...”

“... inequality of wealth, speak of the same world as Peterley’s but seen from the opposite angle,’ John Wain has written. ‘There is no evidence that Peterley worries about social injustice, or thinks about it at all, for that matter.’ With whatever undertow of self-disapproval, Richard Pennington rises from an inferior social position through the phantom ...”

“... In Elizabeth Taylor’s novel The Wedding Group, published in 1968, there is a grand old painter called Harry Bretton. He is modelled, I would guess, on Eric Gill, for the Life, and Stanley Spencer, for the Work. Musing by the studio window, he considers his place in history: Turner was the greatest English painter, and was safely dead, did not encroach or suggest comparisons ...”

“... to him, Rowland had stopped all Lonrho advertising going to the Observer because of criticism by John Davies, the City Editor, over the Lonrho-House of Fraser negotiations. Conor Cruise O’Brien was characteristically frank in writing in his column for the paper that it would be absurd for anybody to suppose that he would feel he could write as freely about ...”

“... creative impulse), it was not out of the desire to register the world around him. His friend John le Gay Brereton could see the importance of Henry Lawson. Brennan couldn’t. He had no interest in the bush, the Labour movement or Australian nationalism. In the Australian Nineties, a period which self-consciously but justifiably felt itself to be alive ...”

“... in the basement of the Architectural Press, the paintings of David Jones and Eric Ravilious, and John Minton’s decorations for the cookery books of Elizabeth David. Only in the coolest hardware shops or the deepest Habitat basements can one believe that the purpose of kitchen design is functional. In the history of taste, painting is only occasionally ...”

“... by such luminaries of the conservative movement as Congressman Larry McDonald (head of the John Birch Society), Fred and Phyllis Schafly, Ray Cline (former deputy-director of the CIA), General Daniel Graham (now leader of the High Frontier – i.e. Star Wars – lobby) and Reed Irvine. Irvine brought a fresh raft of influential supporters into the ...”

“... made even more significant by the fact that it carries a 20-page introduction specially written by John Bayley. The author of the most distinguished book on Pushkin in any language, Bayley here gives the essence of his thoughts on Pushkin in general and Eugene Onegin in particular. Bayley’s book has always been the best full-length introduction to ...”

“... equilibrium’ – an aesthetically interested revision of the ‘reflective equilibrium’ of John Rawls, which puts to work the pleasures and pains that come from imaginative sympathy and not just those that come from social information. The equilibrium is finally achieved when, the sympathetic reading finished, the spectator can assess ‘from her own ...”

“... names and now meaningless events: Yesterday I introduced James to Mrs Inman; – in the evening John Bridges returned from Goodnestone – and this morn before we had left the Breakfast Table we had a visit from Mr Whitfield, whose object I imagine was principally to thank my Eldest Brother for his assistance. Poor Man! – he has now a little intermission ...”

“... event in Keats’s short life, I recommend Amy Clampitt’s musing sequence, ‘Voyages: Homage to John Keats’ (included in What the Light Was Like, and in her recently published Collected Poems). But then Clampitt’s poem is not focused on race, class, gender, or the hunger for ‘success’, buton Keats’s imaginative and intellectual integrations of ...”

“... The yoking of supposedly high and low aspects of life isn’t new, it’s there in Lawrence, and John Cowper Powys finds in it a sort of transgressive holiness, but here it represents no more than a reflex of disgust.Before the ceremony a grieving relative had insisted on the coffin being opened, motivated supposedly by ‘a Huisgenoot article she read last ...”