“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was at art college. At the end of that year, Lily took a job with William Morris’s daughter, May, who taught her to embroider the complicated Morris patterns and to transfer designs to fabric. She was friendly with May, and often ate with the family, but she was not encouraged to make her own designs, and quickly found ...”

“... Robert Wistrich’s book is about the Jews of Vienna in their golden age, Steven Beller’s about the city’s culture in its golden age. You could be forgiven for thinking that these amounted to the same thing. Not all Viennese Jews were cultural heroes, and not all Viennese cultural heroes were Jews. But the overlap is impressive and in need of explanation ...”

“... is protected at this stage, and you can now go ahead and publish if you wish, but eventually you may proceed to a full (or utility) patent, where property rights are wrapped up more securely, and, while IP lawyers make fortunes from litigation about who in fact owns the property, basically the matter is now in the domain of formal law. If the university does ...”

“... some of these magnates (Ralph of Burgundy, Hugh Capet’s great-uncle Odo and his grandfather Robert I) were elected king. When the direct line of Carolingians came to an end with the death of the young Louis V in 987, the claims of his uncle, Charles of Lorraine, were contested by Hugh Capet, count of Paris.Hugh’s success owed much to the support of ...”

“... but rather with the alleged critical assassins: Carl Weber (‘a boorish vulgarian’), Robert Gittings (‘unscrupulous’), Richard Purdy (‘incapable of psychological insight into sexual matters’) and Michael Millgate (‘prim’), the devoted Hardy scholars who have given us studies of the work, an edition of the letters and several ...”