“... section in John Carey’s study, The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), is his apologia for Arnold Bennett, a figure not without parallels in the history of British music and British criticism. Like his hero, Carey enjoys the sport of intellectual-baiting, but doesn’t take it too seriously (though his recurrent characterisation of Hitler as an ...”

“... down well, and John Arden’s Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance was a notorious box-office disaster. But Arnold Wesker’s Roots (which is cited as having disappointing ticket sales in its first run) did capacity business on its revival alongside the other two plays in the trilogy. And Look Back in Anger itself was an immediate television hit, a successful movie and ...”

“... That effort, failing in Vietnam, produced the news reporter as American hero – Neil Sheehan, David Halberstam, Seymour Hersch, Jonathan Schell, Peter Arnett. They reported not only the war the government did not want its citizens to see, but also the government efforts to invent a war for domestic consumption. ‘Part of the Vietnamese Seventh Infantry ...”

“... of lovers in the Islamic haadith, the Heroides of Ovid and the western courtly romances, and David Swale (all too briefly) discusses the limitations of D.H. Lawrence when read in the light of the German Bildungsroman, with its freedom and spiritual adventurousness which is at the same time related to the sense of a given community: these, however, are ...”

“... lack of complexity is also the reason he lends himself to popularising accounts like this one. David Bather Woods writes in a deliberately non-intimidating style as he takes the reader through the various stages of Schopenhauer’s uneventful life. He was born in Danzig in 1788 and visited London as a teenager, where he made sure to drop in at the Bedlam ...”

“... when you set out to look the present in the eye but can’t quite bear the thought? Much of David Marquand’s powerful essay about ‘Britain, now’ is an elegy for a lost past, unsullied by ‘masterless capitalism’, a sad story of the light growing dim, good running to bad, the public realm hollowed out by vested interests, greed and unexamined ...”

“... to fry). To write about the works of Hazlitt, one needs a bias towards history and philosophy. David Bromwich’s study concentrates on the latter discipline, for he is appraising Hazlitt’s understanding of Abstract Ideas and his command of words to express them. But there is also a historical theme running through this excellent book, accompanying the ...”

“... the mistakes.’ Or, get over yourself. There’s a reason for the mental churn. Writing in 1908, Arnold Haultain, one of the earliest and most eloquent of the sport’s many metaphysicians, wanted to know why it is much harder to hit a stationary ball than one that comes at you through the air, as it might do in a game of cricket or tennis, with the added ...”

“... to begin that from this distance seems like happiness.’ In Consciousness and the Novel (2002), David Lodge quotes V.S. Ramachandran describing the need ‘to reconcile the first person and third person accounts of the universe’ as ‘the single most important problem in science’. Lodge goes on to argue that novels – particularly novels written in ...”

“... the Swiss Open in Gstaad, where he was defeated in straight sets by the Argentine veteran Lucas Arnold Ker. ‘It never crossed my mind that “This guy is going to be great,”’ Arnold Ker said. Three years later, in 2001, Federer hit the big time: in his second appearance in the main draw at Wimbledon he beat Pete ...”

“... visitation complaints and defamation suits, and the answers have always been ‘it all depends.’ David Cressy’s excellent book suggests a different approach, examining conflicts over ritual and offering stories rather than statistics. Despite Coverdale, Gouge and the Admonition, a wedding was not only a religious ceremony, but the culmination of weeks or ...”

“... CND, his contempt for the New English Bible, his delight in nude bathing, and his belief that if David Owen had stayed in the Labour Party he would have become its leader. All his columns were eagerly followed, but one series excited particular attention. He reported that his wife, the Hungarian historian Eva Haraszti, was in hospital, and chronicled the ...”

“... which has recently been brilliantly treated in a collection of essays edited by Jenny Doctor, David Wright and Nicholas Kenyon.* In terms (for instance) of its performing space, the crucial dates were 1893 and 1941 (when the Queen’s Hall was destroyed and the concerts moved to the Albert Hall); in terms of sponsorship and organisation, the key years ...”

“... from Bunting, Montgomery published four collections by Roy Fisher, one by Ian Hamilton Finlay, David Jones’s The Tribune’s Visitation, an early collection by Christopher Middleton, and three by Lee Harwood. The publishing provenance of an outsider poet like Harwood can tell you a lot about his work: Fulcrum, Oasis Books, Pig Press, Galloping ...”

“... the vapid tax-and-spend policies they had drifted into. Their new spokesmen – Vincent Cable, David Laws and Mark Oaten – are the first prominent Liberals since Jo Grimond who could seriously claim to be heirs of the Grand Old Man. Political commentators point out that parties make such shifts because otherwise they have little hope of getting ...”