“... Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, Charles Johnstone, Charles Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], Thomas Malory, Charles Maturin, Walter Scott, Philip Sidney, Horace Walpole ... twenty, plus the recognised fathers of the novel ... Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett and Lawrence ...”

“... investment. The Modernist will to literature found its most vivid polemical expression in Wyndham Lewis’s Blast, organ of the Great London Vortex, which managed two violently iconoclastic issues, in June 1914 and July 1915, before collapsing. Kenner devotes some apocalyptic pages to Blast, in which the journal causes immediate and widespread offence, costs ...”

“... a minor poet is like being minor royalty, and no one, as a former lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret once explained to me, is happy as that.’ And we see him abashed by the single-mindedness of an Allen Ginsberg, or the mad self-dedication to the idea of poetry he found in Harry Fainlight. Yet this is so far from being a life of self-indulgence that it ...”

“... he is attempting to heal old wounds and soften his ‘stern age’ into peace. Similarly, C. Day Lewis’s translation of the Aeneid (1952) might be regarded as a shrewd strategy by an establishment operator who hoped one day to succeed Masefield as Poet Laureate. More charitably, it could be argued that Day Lewis’s ...”

“... treat the Conservatives’ return to office as a foregone conclusion: ‘just as was the case for Margaret Thatcher, Cameron will ultimately be judged and defined by what he does.’ A journalist who may be closer to events, Peter Snowdon ends his book on a more equivocal note: ‘If the last four and a half years have been testing for Cameron’s ...”

“... Prejudice. The book was enormously successful on its appearance in March 2003, winning praise from Margaret Atwood (‘All readers should read it’) and Susan Sontag (‘I was enthralled and moved’). It stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 117 weeks and has been translated into 32 languages. Its popularity created a market for Iranian women’s ...”

“... eyes. Right to the end (she died aged 94 in 2003), Elsie’s criterion for female beauty remained Margaret Lockwood, Hitchcock’s other early star (so good in The Lady Vanishes), whose top eyelids were sootily shadowed, mascara’d and lined, but whose lower lids remained untouched. Elsie’s eyeliner days were long behind her; her grooming consisted of ...”

“... The inquest on Charles Bravo in 1876 lasted a month and provided his parents’ solicitor, George Lewis, with the national celebrity which made him the upper classes’ favourite, and most expensive, legal confidant. In 1865, Sir James Willes wept as he sentenced Constance Kent to death for suffocating her little brother and hiding his body in the vault of an ...”

“... Grimm very slightly to the punch, Thomas Keightley brought out his Fairy Mythology in 1828; Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, which appeared nearly a century later, had a similar aim. Since then, books and articles about the ‘fairy faith’ have continued to appear. But there was no ‘faith’, no ‘mythology’. It would have ...”

“... she’d get mad she would hum all the time, like a rattlesnake before it strikes’); Jerry Lewis (‘He did all the talking … The only thing that would stop Jerry Lewis was an elephant gun’); Margaret Dumont (‘She was absolutely bald. She wore a wig which Harpo used to ...”

“... son, was settled in Oxfordshire at Stratton Audley. He lived until 1326 and married a sister of Margaret, sister and co-heiress of Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester and granddaughter of Edward I. He was a rival therefore of Despenser for the Clare inheritance in Glamorgan and was very active against Despenser in 1322-6. His father indeed was attainted in ...”

“... up the era of punk and the woman who factored punk sensibilities into a political philosophy: Margaret Thatcher. And what Patrick Keiller in his film London (1994) called ‘a tyranny of the suburbs’. A brutal assault on the centre, the polis, before the hollowing out of Kensington and Chelsea, and the colonisation of Thames Gateway and the empty ...”

“... at a house in the Village, and that they had Red Bread and Red Drink.’ Another accuser, Mercy Lewis, said: ‘they did eat Red Bread like Mans Flesh, and would have her eat some: but she would not.’ Like Psellos, the Salem authorities believed that they had stumbled on a diabolic conspiracy: ‘These witches, whereof above a score have now ...”

“... Colley, Meehan Crist, Anne Enright, Lorna Finlayson, Lisa Hallgarten and Jayne Kavanagh, Sophie Lewis, Maureen N. McLane, Erin Maglaque, Gazelle Mba, Azadeh Moaveni, Toril Moi, Joanne O’Leary, Niela Orr, Lauren Oyler, Susan Pedersen, Jacqueline Rose, Madeleine Schwartz, Arianne Shahvisi, Sophie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Alice Spawls, Amia ...”

“... death. I first met him in 1968 when Patrick Garland brought him backstage with Princess Margaret after Forty Years On. A friend of Patrick’s, he talked mostly to him, but Princess Margaret didn’t confine herself to John Gielgud and Paul Eddington but to her credit wanted to meet the boys in the play, which she ...”