“... members preferred less gruesome explanations for the playwright’s brilliance. Robert Folkestone Williams, later to write a trilogy of biographical novels about Shakespeare – Shakespeare and His Friends, The Youth of Shakespeare and The Secret Passion – reverts to a less elaborate version of the Ovid-goes-to-Stratford manner in ‘A Hymn to ...”

“... Professor Shahak, the great Israeli human rights activist. There is a strikingly good article on Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet in which Hitchens discusses the ambiguities and contradictions of British rule in India. And there is an excellent defence of George Orwell which is somewhat reminiscent of Orwell’s own essay in defence of Kipling. Hitchens lines ...”

“... the Negro Intellectual (it is structured around discussions of James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Paul Robeson and Richard Wright). All the same, it ‘opened an extraordinary space of recalling that there had been a radical black intellectual past’, Robinson explained in an interview in 2013. ‘As a participant, he had every right to recall it in the ...”

“... But there were moments of real conversation and he spoke of real grievances,’ Adeline Vaughan Williams wrote after one of many visits with her husband, Gurney’s one-time teacher of composition, admirer and longstanding advocate. My own hunch is that other Gurney personae usually written off as lunatic fictions – Michael Flood, Frederick ...”

“... Britain in 1951 knew what to celebrate. At the start of the opening ceremony – a service in St Paul’s – the King praised the nation’s courage in the world wars; the official handbook declared categorically that ‘Britain is a Christian Community’; brightly coloured pavilions on the South Bank paid tribute to picturesque countryside, seaside ...”

“... enjoyable new history of the Protectorate, which collapsed nine months after Cromwell’s death, Paul Lay is bracing and undeceived in his judgments. He is the editor of History Today, and he writes in the best tradition of that magazine, accessible but sound in detail, with an alert eye for the significant details academic historians sometimes slide ...”

“... with the words LOVE ME. The high point of her career came when she was cast in Tennessee Williams’s Small Craft Warnings. Williams thought Darling was ‘marvellous to work with … a disciplined performer and very funny and touching’. They became friends, confiding to each other their problems with men.Darling ...”

“... Cup, questions of personal rig-out seemed to be of central consequence. David Beckham’s Jean Paul Gaultier sarong, plus his newly blonde-streaked looks, may well have had something to do with Glenn Hoddle’s less than friendly treatment of him in England’s opening games. And this treatment may in turn have led to Beckham’s game-turning folly against ...”

“... while supervising a Work Projects Administration programme. She had had a copy of William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain at the corner of her desk, which she had bought so she’d have something to read on the long subway ride to and from work. The couple had a son, Paul, in 1943, a musical prodigy and now a ...”

“... discredit Lawrence’s advocacy of sexual polarity. Balbert catches them quoting out of context: Paul Morel’s patronising view of the suffrage movement is not Lawrence’s, but part of a dialogue with Clara Dawes which will eventually reveal Clara’s emotional failure; Miriam Leivers’s polemic against sexual inequality reveals her lack of ‘healthy ...”

“... Left and its intelligentsia 1968-86 and not allude to, among others, E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Perry Anderson, Robin Blackburn, R.D. Laing, and the personnel of the New Statesman, would be to create another kind of absent centre. Caute solves this problem by resort to the teasing deceits of the Disraelian political romance. That ...”

“... a Bible on matters linguistic. Nor, one imagines, could a post-Willinsky scholar do what Raymond Williams did in the Fifties and base a major intellectual enterprise on the confident assumption that OED represents ‘a systematic, reliable and comprehensive history of the English vocabulary’ – raw lexical material. In the Foreword of Keywords ...”

“... Paul Auster​ ’s new novel, 4321, is a lightly edited two-inch-thick Bildungsroman divided into four timelines, each a possible iteration of a single character’s life. That character is born at the end of a prologue consisting mostly of family prehistory: Russian Jews emigrate to New York and bear a child, Stanley; Stanley marries comely Rose, and they beget our protagonist, Archie Ferguson ...”

“... So characteristic of Paul Muldoon’s poetry as to be almost a hallmark is the moment, unnerving and exciting in about equal measures, when his speaker is suddenly revealed to himself as someone else. The whole world expands and changes in ‘Cass and Me’ when, as a boy, he climbs on the older Cass’s shoulders, and they lean out                across the yard As a giant would across the world ...”

“... to end up feeling that she has a point. The critical approach she has in mind is a form of what Paul Ricoeur calls the hermeneutics of suspicion. On this view, the task of critique is to dig out hidden meanings and concealed contradictions in a text, scanning it for those symptomatic points at which it falters, deadlocks, disrupts its own logic or threatens ...”