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“... snobs and sports are by no means all boastful or complicit. The supreme text of recent years is James Fox’s account of Lord Lucan and his set, with their boffes de politesse. There is a touch of Lucanian zombiness in The Monument, and the peer himself takes part in The Passion of John Aspinall. Patrician insolence has quite often appeared to express a ...”

“... shows how the ‘carnivalesque’ was harnessed to official ideologies under Elizabeth and James I. Terence Hawkes, Francis Barker and Peter Hulme (AS), and Paul Brown (PS), link The Tempest with the ideology of colonisation, arguing that the play’s formal involutions reflect, not transcendent truths about illusion ...”

“... of song. Many of her poems seem to ask to be set to music by Delius, Vaughan Williams, Finzi or Peter Warlock; especially those about peopled and unpeopled landscapes, the first cuckoo in Spring, faith gained or lost, and doves come flying. As if waiting for them to be set, she gives them a provisional music of her own, in keeping with the sentiment that we ...”

“... and Edward Fugion, did a thoroughly professional job in following the Irish revolutionary priest James O’Coigley and tracing his associates. In a delightfully libellous caricature by Isaac Cruikshank the runners were imagined not only as a formidable anti-radical force but as a force of nature. It shows Charles James Fox ...”

“... between Prufrock’s ‘overwhelming question’ (line 10) and the observation in Chapter 23 of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers that ‘The whole company were a good deal astounded with this overwhelming question’? Certainly Eliot’s mind was a vast, labyrinthine echo chamber, and perhaps more than any other canonical poet of the English ...”

“... of Northern Irish history has, however, come from post-Althusserian scholars like Paul Bew, Peter Gibbon and Henry Patterson,* and their work on the class dynamics of Unionism, as well as the nature of Southern nationalism, leads to very different conclusions: Struggles over the status of the North are no more automatically anti-imperialist than crimes ...”

“... should have been digested or they shouldn’t have been broached. The TLS furore or fury about Peter Reading’s poem ‘Cub’ – anti-semitic, or dramatising anti-semitism? – isn’t appropriately or commensurately to be engaged with in two pages of musings (under the aegis ‘Or Only Funny and Sad?’), ending with: ‘Tone is a fearfully difficult ...”

“... back tae snowk at his bockin ... Grumphie douks i the burn, an syne rows again i the glaur. (II Peter 2.22: ‘The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire’). Except perhaps for a few scholars, no one, however Scots, is going to know all the words in this translation; most Scots will not know a great ...”

“... just as the splendid F-16 fighter and A-10 attack plane had to be imposed by Defence Secretary James Schlesinger on an unwilling Air Force. The Army’s research bureaucracy has been particularly accident prone. Its attempt to build a successor tank to the undistinguished M-60 series went through two costly fiascos and al-most two decades before it finally ...”

“... Monarchy of Austria-Hungary) and now has, in English, an almost entirely new oeuvre to the one James Wood wrote about here soon after he died (and I wrote about in the TLS).* For a dead foreign writer to be allowed to carry on in this way is, to say the least, rather unusual. At that time, Wood wrote about a great comic writer, and I about a man whose best ...”

“... interesting pages where he recognises a group of novelists, from Hans Andersen to Henry James and Proust, as presenting special difficulties of inaccessibility. I think it unsurprising that, as well as making this potentially explosive discrimination among novelists, Tucker is also fairer to Blyton than most critics are. Inglis, equally identifying ...”

“... help from the electorate themselves. That is, it was enough until the arrival on the scene of James Goldsmith and Tony Blair. It is a sign of how little referendums have in common with fully democratic politics that a one-man, one-note band like Goldsmith’s anti-federalists were able to call themselves the Referendum Party and get away with ...”

“... despite its apparently relaxed approach to colonial ‘Marxism’. It was this approach that got Peter Wright het up enough to suspect his own director-general, Roger Hollis, of being a Soviet mole. (He thought the same of the relatively liberal Sir Andrew Cohen, governor of Uganda in the 1950s.) Wright got all this from the notorious CIA molehunter ...”

“... horrific realities of everyday life in a Nazi-conquered Britain (this found form as a novella, I, James Blunt). And in the summer of 1940 he wrote an article for Country Life entitled ‘The New “Merry England”’, in which he describes the invigorating camaraderie of Binsted, his home village, where he was the commander of the Local Defence ...”

“... after his death, is their originator. There are now six biographies, of which the best remains James Gleick’s inevitably-entitled Genius (1992). Feynman’s Caltech Lectures on Physics and collections of miscellaneous anecdotes and essays remain in print and in demand, as do audiotapes and videos of his lectures: he was a scientific performance artist of ...”