“... and where by the early 1920s both the poet laureate Robert Bridges and the future poet laureate John Masefield had established themselves in suburban comfort. Graves lived from 1919 to 1921 in Dingle Cottage at the bottom of Masefield’s garden. I walk my dog past the cottage quite often. It’s set down in a marshy hollow which has a faint air of primal ...”

“... on the Democrats for congressional support. Elite leadership of the Republican Party collapsed. John McCain chose the shockingly unqualified Sarah Palin as a running mate in the 2008 election because she was hugely popular with the Republican base, who revelled in the outrage she triggered among liberals. Barack Obama’s victory in that election only ...”

“... to stop jostling for advantage and to start brooding on revenge. ‘Victories and defeats,’ as John Stoessinger put it, summarising Kissinger’s thinking, ‘merely lead to other wars. Only a settlement without victory or defeat could lead to stability.’ Talk of national honour was a useful holding device, because honour could never be satisfied: it ...”

“... with becoming a plumber or hairdresser or sushi chef. It would support a view of authorship like John Gregory Dunne’s, who described writing for a living as ‘a job, like laying pipe’.Imitating Authors describes two developments over the past three centuries that helped imitation lose its old sense and take a pejorative turn. The first is the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... who among other things improvised a more edifying ending to Jane Eyre (Jane ended up with St John Rivers), to the larger-than-life adoptive mother who among other things improvised a more edifying ending to Jane Eyre? Then there’s the rhetorical preening of Winterson’s last paragraph, which affects to pass her mother the microphone. If this ...”

“... with respect to the British Bomb was closely held. The key players were Churchill, Lindemann and John Anderson, a senior minister in the war cabinet. They were in turn dependent on the experts’ constantly changing, often conflicting views as to whether an atomic bomb was possible and, if so, what it would do and how it might be used, how much it would ...”

“... big users extra.A network of local campaign groups tries to keep the issue in the public eye. John Pritchard, chairman of the Ver Valley Society, took me to a bridge seven and a half miles downstream from the river’s source. Here the Ver used to make itself known in a channel running between the M1 motorway and Watling Street, the old Roman road. What ...”

“... for future projects: Red Shift, a publishing imprint, after the Alan Garner novel; an essay on John Akomfrah’s film triptych The Unfinished Conversation, featuring the memories of Stuart Hall; a book of essays about Kanye West. These interests are all evident in Fisher’s work too.The second memorial lecture was given in January by the American ...”

“... of Enfield, from the station at Turkey Street, you march down Ordnance Road. This was the route John Clare took, travelling in the other direction, when he walked away from the High Beach madhouse in Epping Forest. Powder-burns on privet. Suburban avenues, lacking pedestrians, with front gardens just big enough to take a parked car. Vandalised ...”

“... leave the wishful thinking to the other team. Some of Clough’s protégés were a bit fat, like John Robertson, or a bit clumsy, like Larry Lloyd; Mourinho’s are all lean and mean. But fat or thin, neither manager would ever let any of his players start to believe their own publicity. Both have consistently wanted their teams to believe in the ...”

“... of repression in which men like Elliott Abrams (now Deputy NSA and special assistant to Bush) and John Negroponte (now National Intelligence director) connived during the 1980s in Central America. The brazen persecution of Sahrawis is once again common, after a three-year interval of relative calm, following Hassan II’s death. In 2001, Mohamed Daddach, a ...”