“... not the other. Kathleen Raine and Ruth Pitter cannot be found in O’Brien, but Elma Mitchell and Martin Bell cannot be found in Armitage and Crawford. Elma Mitchell’s ‘Thoughts after Ruskin’ is a revelation, and to put her in is to do exactly the sort of thing anthologies are meant to do: extend the terrain as they go over it. These books are also ...”

“... than ‘outrageous’ (the blurb’s word), will fill us with a gloom like that discerned by Martin Scorsese in the worn features of the aging funnyman played by Jerry Lewis in his splendid recent film King of Comedy. The stories in Italo Calvino’s Marcovaldo (1963), a collection of 20 urban fables occupying a point ...”

“... the freelance testimony of Susan Rosenstiel, wife of the mobbed-up ‘businessman’ and swinger Lewis Rosenstiel, one of Hoover’s many and sweaty connections to the high life of organised crime. At a session with Roy Cohn in the Plaza Hotel in 1958, the Director of the FBI was allegedly wearing a fluffy black dress, very fluffy, with flounces, and lace ...”

“... else again. Whereas British political biography, with the (white) elephantine exception of Martin Gilbert’s Churchill is, almost as a matter of professional pride, a one-volume affair, there is a well established American tradition of monumentalism, based, it seems, on the assumption that a blockbusting person requires a blockbuster book. Caro seems ...”

“... scholars singled out for attack in Orientalism (H.A.R. Gibb, Gustave von Grunebaum and Bernard Lewis among others), before moving on to a chapter-length critique of Orientalism itself. So how effectively does Irwin challenge Said? Factual purists will be delighted by his pot-shots. He makes mincemeat of such sweeping assertions as ‘Britain and France ...”

“... 1940 of Occult Causes of the Present War, by the folklorist, esotericist and Scottish nationalist Lewis Spence, there has been a persistent strand of crypto-historical writing, occasionally augmented by television programmes claiming that Hitler used, or was the creature of, real and sinister magical forces. Serious students of Nazism have rightly paid little ...”

“... a household name, and while the children entering that school can surely tell you something about Martin Luther King Jr, and probably about Malcolm X too, I wonder what they know of the man for whom their school is named. The Columbia undergraduates up the street, who read W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk in the Plato-to-Arendt ‘great ...”

“... admiration for his prose style. Not everybody agrees, and it can still be maintained, as by Lewis Freed in his book The Critic as Philosopher (1979), that Eliot’s critical theories are Bradleyan almost through and through. Now, however, we have Richard Shusterman with a new view of the whole matter. He believes that Eliot is much more interesting as a ...”

“... the vocalist makes his entry. It’s Tony Bennett singing ‘From Rags to Riches’. The film is Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990). All kinds of things are going on here, artful, intelligent, violent and ironic. The broadest effect is that of the song, with its implication of a sarcasm as old as gangster movies themselves. Organised crime is a paradigm ...”

“... of rock ’n’ roll focuses on the white triumvirate – Presley, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis, who have at different times heaped contumely on themselves – neglecting its roots in Jazz and the Blues, and a sibling relationship with Soul. Along the way, that history has appropriated the music on behalf of a white audience by perpetuating the myths ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... waging it, and there are women, too, sometimes centre-stage though more often in the background. Martin Middlebrook’s The First Day on the Somme and John Keegan’s The Face of Battle are the mini-masterpieces I remember from school; this century, Antony Beevor, Max Hastings and Holland have led the British pack. The history of war is now certainly more ...”

“... Basil Lee, where the narrator, returning from the War of American Independence, makes landfall on Lewis, and half-sceptical of, half-fascinated by the popular superstitions of the Hebrides, spends a night in the cottage of an old woman reputed to be visited by spirits. During the course of a hideous night, the corpse of her dead son materialises in a corner ...”

“... to find a way to live. In the book, Kerouac had divided himself among several brothers named Martin. One (Pete) was fiercely determined to excel at football, a second (Joe) drove big trucks and longed to wander the West at terrifying speed on a motorcycle, and a third (Francis) was ‘a musing, discontented, lonely young reader of books … filled with a ...”

“... book Sandage turns to the rise of the modern credit system. The central character in that story, Lewis Tappan, was a wealthy merchant and an evangelical reformer who joined the crusade to uphold the Sabbath against the rising tide of secular modernity, threw himself into the fight for temperance (in the 1820s), co-founded the American Anti-Slavery Society ...”