“... hard to tell. The middle-aged literary grandees who took him up were all university-educated and may have found Barker’s unschooled eloquence refreshingly different, or simply been stunned by his confidence and good looks. Alanna Autumnal, published in 1933, contained a characteristic piece of bravado, citing under ‘By the Same Author’ one as yet ...”

“... Robert Vitalis​ tells a great story about how he came to write this book. Some years ago, sitting in the Clark University library avoiding grading his students’ final exams, he pulled an old history of the university off the shelf. Clark played a key role in the birth of the field of international relations in the two decades before the First World War, he read, especially by founding and supporting one of the new discipline’s flagship journals, the Journal of Race Development ...”

“... the whole thing like a campaign advert directed by John Ford. In Milwaukee, I bumped into Robert Auth, a member of the New Jersey General Assembly, who began telling me and a Swedish journalist that the Republican Party had always been all about surviving and staying on course. ‘We’re shocked,’ he said, ‘but we’ll go about our ...”

“... the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly spottable. For those hitting the right places in Manhattan, Sontag sightings were as recurring and oddly reassuring as Warhol sightings, as ...”

“... flawed advantages of being ‘authorised’: there are no anecdotes here about what Louis B. Mayer may or may not have done to the pubescent Judy Garland, or others in his thrall. The worst that is said of the man many still speak of as a monster is that he was a ‘part-affectionate, part-retributive tyrant’. Where Mr ...”

“... dialect poems are plainly superior to his poems in Standard English, much as Burns in Scots is, we may well think, better and more authentic than Burns in English. One who made the comparison with Burns was Gerard Manley Hopkins, writing in 1879 to Robert Bridges. Of Barnes’s dialect poems Hopkins says: ‘A proof of their ...”

“... How do we want our judges to make their decisions? Robert Jenrick, shadow justice minister for the Tories until his defection to Reform in January, told the Conservative Party Conference last year that ‘judges who blur the line between adjudication and activism can have no place in our justice system.’ Judicial activism is a habitual complaint of those on the right when legal decisions don’t go their way ...”

“... is proved right. This Pixar animation seems to be a political fable. The daycare centre may be taken to represent the public realm, the polity, and Andy the private realm, the family; the cowboy is the hero because he stands for family values. But why make the hero a cowboy? Boys may still play with toy ...”

“... secular verse. Guest concentrates exclusively on Smart as a religious poet, in fact, and it may be a sign of our current lack of confidence in literary ‘greatness’ that ‘the ambition and significance’ of his achievement are eventually defined in a context of mid-18th-century religious preoccupations. Making clear the contemporary issues at stake ...”

“... and especially little by comparison with the achievements of German philologists such as Ernst Robert Curtius. English Classicists are inclined to regard anything later than Silver Age Latin as beneath their notice, thus perpetuating the prejudices of Renaissance scholars (who could at least claim to have read some of the works they rejected). British ...”

“... had a worldly political purpose. Many of the Surrealists claimed an adherence to Communism that may have embarrassed more run-of-the-mill Party members, but that was nonetheless sincere. The collectivisation of art, entailing, of course, the abolition of the artist as ‘property-owner’ of his work, was an important part of the Surrealist campaign. The ...”

“... preface to his Collected Poems (1963): ‘A poet who has been too a sharp critic of other poets may ruefully expect even sharper criticism than his poems deserve.’ He may expect it, but let us disappoint his expectations. Suppose we reject the tit-for-tat, beggar-my-neighbour principle on which Grigson’s literary ...”

“... into the land of the free. Assange has been denounced by everybody from the US defense secretary, Robert Gates, to my nephew Rory, a student at the University of Aberdeen, who believes Assange is alone responsible for a general upswing in the fortunes of computer nerds at the expense of guitar heroes. I have now read a number of the 92,000 reports leaked by ...”

“... feelings. Gray’s later experiments with bardic odes and self-conscious ‘fragments’ may have qualified him to be considered a proto-Romantic in some sketches of poetical history, but Wordsworth was right to think of him at ‘the head’ of an alien poetical culture. Gray loved poetic diction, as well as scholarly quotation, poetic inversions of ...”

“... the worse for knowing what is being said by the mob! This paragraph is dated all right: 1936. We may wince at Agate’s scorn for mincing and reflect that the hearty drill-sergeant reference lends support to James Harding’s portrait of Agate as a straight-acting gay, addicted to guardsmen. However, we now have some idea of Olivier’s effect upon the Old ...”