“... in whom SF riffs are completely subsumed in metaphor. Elsewhere, Lem Two seems to glance back to Swift, Voltaire and Gogol, or sideways to Borges and Pynchon. These are names the SF tradition has often used to decorate its wrong-side-of-the-tracks clubhouse. Yet those writers would be bewildered at the clannish rituals and arcane litmus tests typical of the ...”

“... the other hand, the event was so crass that one wondered if it had not been entirely imagined by Jonathan Swift or Paul Durcan, whose poem ‘What Shall I Wear, Darling, to the Great Hunger?’ is included in Tom Hayden’s book Irish Hunger.During the week before the Bank Holiday concert, John Waters wrote:This weekend, courtesy of the Minister [Avril ...”

“... least, on Lowell, Auden, Plath, Heaney, Ashbery and many more. He made his name as a specialist on Swift, where his monumental biography, completed in 1983, has told us more than any previous source about the man, his works and the age, to draw on a subtitle Victorian in its confident amplitude. His most lasting book may yet prove to be Literary Meaning and ...”

“... enclosure, reprinted in Healy’s collection, one of Marvell’s most interesting recent critics, Jonathan Crewe, shows how ‘The Garden’ exposes ‘a widespread cultural fantasy of the supposedly autonomous, originary masculine subject’. This, though Crewe does not say so, is because Marvell’s irony uses a form of camp to unsettle conventional ...”

“... and Mack so reticent about the ‘frequently homoerotic correspondence’ between Pope and Swift? What of Gay, ‘who never married and whose psychological attachment to the older, if occasionally paternal, Pope merits more attention than it has received?’ Not for the first time Rousseau’s enthusiasm gets the better of his facts here: Gay was ...”

“... of US fiction writers around his age that includes the late David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides. There are a few things that set Antrim apart: he’s Southern; his strongest affinity to a writer in the previous generation is to Donald Barthelme, not Don DeLillo; he’s the least likely to be topical, to dramatise a few ...”

“... sound-bites from a phantom Smith Square manifesto. Two coppers can’t sit down for a swift half without debating the morality of capital punishment. (‘I happen to believe that the death penalty does deter, so what I’m saying is that I’m willing for innocent people to take a greater chance of being murdered so that I can salve my conscience ...”

“... process of an immense worm.’ In Bomber County: The Poetry of a Lost Pilot’s War, Daniel Swift writes about the strangeness of Jarrell’s war: ‘No one was ever so far from the war as Randall Jarrell, deep in Texas.’ He started training as a pilot. ‘Flying is pretty dull,’ he wrote to Edmund Wilson, ‘and I’m bad at it.’ At the beginning ...”

“... that all interpretation is necessarily misinterpretation (reduced by calmer exponents such as Jonathan Culler to the uncontentious assertion that no interpretation can ever be final), and the dashing new formulation of the old problem of intention – Ellis argues with force and clarity. Moreover he happens to believe that some writings are more complex ...”

“... excitement). In a career whose contours provide another of Brewer’s telling case-studies, Jonathan Tyers, proprietor of Vauxhall Gardens, made it a place of music and art, as well as parade and flirtation. Those who paid their shilling might be serenaded not only by love songs and patriotic airs, but also by the music of Corelli, J.C. Bach and ...”

“... death. One Scotsman’s effects, listed at Calcutta, included the works of Shakespeare, Milton and Swift, a backgammon table, a hookah, four empty cases of gin and two Malay slave-girls: an epitome of Scotland overseas, outcome of a jumbled, contradictory evolution of Scotland at home. North America yields a crop of intriguing topics, from tobacco cultivation ...”

“... future’ that otherwise awaited him, one in which he never leaves Ohio or tells off Taylor Swift. She made him do his homework and kept him away from the local kids who smoked marijuana, threatening that ‘if she saw me in the presence of any person on the banned list, she would run him over with her car.’ He believed that she would do it: as a ...”

“... of legality and transparency and this in turn may stand in the way of an operation being swift and decisive. And the question of whether it is ‘do-able’ is vital – an intervention that fails is by definition immoral. Realpolitik criteria are not much less problematic, hingeing as they do on notions of ‘national interest’. Did the Kosovo ...”

“... Howl, are all ‘published in Heaven’. You won’t find his tributes to Gordon Lish (pen-pal) or Jonathan Meades (doorstepped) in any literary periodical. If you tracked down the originals, you might spot some of the elements that dress Seabrook’s whippy style: the Meades-to-camera performed prose, the music-hall delivery of arcane information. Seabrook is ...”

“... courage or the luck – from a project one had taken to be one’s own. ‘A courageous person,’ Jonathan Lear has suggested, ‘has a proper orientation towards what is shameful and what is fearful.’ We tend to think of giving up, in the ordinary way, as a lack of courage, as an improper or embarrassing orientation towards what is shameful and ...”