“... some of the best contemporary poets and translators such as Alastair Reid, Richard Wilbur and John Hollander. He also worked with Borges on translating his prose works into English, and coaxed him into producing new stories and a long autobiographical piece for the New Yorker. All of this is vividly described in The Lesson of the Master: On Borges and His ...”

“... unoccupied for more than two minutes they would inevitably bugger each other. I share with Sir John Betjeman the fate of having been educated at a public school so steeped in the Arnold tradition that, when we were there, water closets were doorless: but perhaps the Laureate was exaggerating when, later in life, he said that he did not have a bowel ...”

“... realist? His engagement with the Communist Party – he had been a leader of the Chicago John Reed Club, the CPUSA writers’ group, and published journalism in The New Masses – contributed, but Wright’s relationship with the party had always been stormy, particularly when it came to aesthetics. His 1937 manifesto, ‘Blueprint for Negro ...”

“... Boston . . . Portland . . . Bangor . . . Meductic . . . Sydney, Nova Scotia . . . St John’s, Newfoundland. Then the trail goes cold: it is said he enlisted in the crew of a Danish fishing boat. It was probably during this journey that Cravan’s last extant literary text was written. A sheaf of what might be called ‘automatic writings’, it ...”

“... the one long propounded in Reynolds’s Discourses, whose ‘political theory of painting’, as John Barrell phrases it, was closely bound up with his support of Burke’s attack on revolution. Blake, who said of the Discourses, ‘This Whole Book was Written to Serve Political Purposes,’ also spoke of what might be concealed in the decent drapery of ...”

“... their own glory or catastrophe. The stories hang together well, the odd man out being Corporal John Ledyard, a marine, of Groton, Connecticut. (Another Boy’s Own boy: Thomas Jefferson encouraged him to walk from Siberia to Nootka Sound, off Vancouver Island, and on to Virginia. He was arrested at Irkutsk and returned to the Polish border; later he was ...”

“... teaching and writing of history in English education in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. John Burrow, Reba Softer, Doris Goldstein, Donald Winch, Stefan Collini, Dwight Culler, Deborah Wormell and Rosemary Jann among others have written on one or another dimension. As a secondary but related argument, Slee says that scholars have tended to use the ...”

“... accuracy was not the question here: Sigismondo, after all, is in some sense another name for John Quinn, the New York lawyer and cultural patron whose generosity had been indispensable to the cultural economy of Modernism. But was that all? Was Mussolini, for Pound, merely a phantasmagoric projection of the Modernist patron? Admirers of Pound have often ...”

“... at Mahoney when she brings coffee in on a serving tray, but otherwise ignore her. Mike Nichols and John Hersey win grudging approval – the former for giving her a nice tip, the latter for his kindly, slightly alcoholic smile (‘He had the look of a person who understood other people, who wanted to hear what they had to say’). Joseph Alsop, making chitchat ...”

“... cooking. All the good in the world has always been done after a good dinner.’ If the historian John Tosh’s picture of Victorian masculinities is correct, Household Management was first published during a rather brief cultural moment when men were exceptionally satisfied with their absorption into a domesticity controlled by their wives. It seems clear ...”

“... we may ask about the forms in which and the conditions under which exploitation can appear. John Roemer has constructed a series of models that allow us to answer these questions. In particular, he has found that exploitation can occur without class formation, if it arises by exchange in the commodity market; that exploitation arising in the labour ...”

“... the counter-transference (the analyst’s emotional reaction to his patient). She was cool towards John Bowlby’s pioneering combination of psychoanalytic methods with those of ethology. Her attitude to the wider intellectual community remained as unconcerned as ever. It is perhaps in fidelity to Klein that Professor Grosskurth has made little attempt to ...”

“... the propaganda and makes a fair and sensible speech on the Middle East – such as Governor John Connally in 1980 – is taught a sharp lesson. Jewish Americans make up only 2.7 per cent of the population of the United States, but partly because of their concentration in some pivotal states and mainly because of their influence on the American media and ...”

“... by a dozen other books from which I still derive an income – the gilt-edged securities, as John Osborne calls them. Once you know how to write, it is not difficult to make money. A certain facility develops. One has a notebook full of ideas, but they are not to be used as a timetable. They emerge in their own good time, usually after a long soak in the ...”

“... finally, like a wine sauce, into an ultramontane oddity? Those vexed by the thought should turn to John Davis’s collection of historical essays, Gramsci and Italy’s Passive Revolution.4 It is concerned with aspects of Italy’s failed revolution, in both the 19th and the 20th centuries. Mr Davis’s lucid introduction emphasises how essential this context ...”