“... themselves are so often women, spurned or murdered or guilt-ridden: Mrs Mothersole in ‘The Ash Tree’, Ann Clark in ‘Martin’s Close’, Theodosia Bryan in ‘A Neighbour’s Landmark’ and the terrible figure in ‘a shapeless sort of blackened sun-bonnet’ in ‘Wailing Well’. We don’t need to have read any of the Freud which James would ...”

“... of life.’ Barker’s precocity was impressive, and attracted the attention and patronage of John Middleton Murry, T.S. Eliot and Edwin Muir. Murry gave the 19-year-old poet two books to review for the Adelphi on the strength of some pages of diary (later worked up into the first novel) and Barker had published in New Verse, Criterion and the Listener at ...”

“... century, with being one of the first writers to praise the loveliness of trees. This won’t do. John Evelyn, a century before, had spoken of beeches making ‘spreading trees and noble shades with their well-furnish’d and glistering leaves’, and also of Xerxes’ admiration of the plane: ‘that so beautiful and precious tree’. Timothy Pont, at the ...”

“... seems to be alone in hinting, if cartoonishly, at its power; as the post-9/11 efforts of John Updike and Martin Amis show, it is easier to reduce ideological belief to pathologies of sexual frustration, or the ordeal of constipation. A self-dissolving post-ideological irony is the dominant mode of the few narratives about Americans engaged in the ...”

“... turned out to be the only part of the fireplace where my father wouldn’t flick his cigarette ash. For another thing, I went to a school where Mr Knocker, the teacher, was football-daft, and he’d sooner you packed in Communion than afternoon football. But Mark McDonald – my fellow cissy – and I broke his spirit after he gave us new yellow strips to ...”

“... box (or Rubik’s Cube). The three barbicans that command the points of the V are House of Fraser, John Lewis, Marks & Spencer. There is an upper and a lower mall. The temperature is unnatural; so temperate that it drives you mad. You can’t sweat. You’re blow-dried. You can’t breathe. Air is recycled as in an airliner. You’re supposed to make those ...”

“... contaminated by that terror.Abstraction does not lend itself to satire. The once savage collagist John Heartfield, lost without his galère of targets, became well-mannered. Few were able to bring with them so much as a fraction of their past work. And the ethos, the society and the gallery of subjects peculiar to that society dispersed, vanished into ...”

“... IQ to race or class, a fundamentalist approach to biology that has its roots in the Twenties in John Davenport’s testimony to Congress that alcoholism, poverty and avarice are genetically determined traits of Irish, Italian and Jewish populations, respectively. It is easy to criticise such views as ‘standing on a mountain of ...”

“... whose number were the CEO of Lockheed, Marillynn Hewson, and Obama’s outgoing defence secretary, Ash Carter, who had helped seal the deal. Israel is the only country that has been allowed to make significant modifications to the F-35: its variant, nicknamed the Adir (‘the mighty one’), includes a few extra computer systems of Israel’s own ...”

“... nasty David Benedictus-like episode, with prefect ‘Dick’ going too far in wielding the Ground Ash, leads to a new school mandate for the lighter but more efficient cane: much relish here in the details. ‘Dick’ moans to Stephen Spender: ‘Even if I become prime minister, I’ll never again be as great as I was at Winchester.’ ‘Dick’ is ...”

“... circles the new guides, with their unmistakably foreign approach, got a mixed reception. John Summerson, reviewing them for the New Statesman, felt a need to bring his readers, and indeed himself, round to the idea. ‘Books on the English counties’ had, as he said, ‘come rather thick since the war’. The others, of varying quality, tended to be ...”

“... in, each of the folds of the brain), as well as for ‘cineritious’ (its ash-colour) and for the names of the muscles that held the brain in place. There was nothing lunatic about this: it was a vocabulary of precision, with an idiolect designed to describe but not circumscribe the workings of the brain.One reader, Fielding ...”

“... more serious and scientific than love notes.) The second example is a murder mystery about John Gower by Bruce Holsinger, which takes a different tack.2 Chaucer is glimpsed; he is a calculating and casual character, shallowly obsessed with his literary reputation and erotic conquests. The daring comes partly from making Gower – whose literary image ...”

“... field for a woman. Its policy on female employees was unusually egalitarian. When Matheson met John Reith, the first director-general, through her work for Astor, he recruited her to be director of talks on the phenomenal salary of £900 a year. She was 38 and unmarried, fully formed as a character. Yet the Matheson of this period remains, despite her ...”

“... find it hard to do so – for instance, when Falstaff disappears, or rather turns into Sir John Oldcastle, since it is known that in early performances (though not in any printed form of the plays) that is what he was called. Oldcastle’s descendants protested, and the consequence was the presumably unique disclaimer in the Epilogue to 2 Henry IV. The ...”