“... in its way, theoretically sophisticated work it is. Watt cites Lukács in German and Durkheim in French, alongside works by Weber, Troeltsch, Mannheim, Merton, Parsons, Radcliffe-Brown and more. In his preface he thanks Adorno, Henry Nash Smith, I.A. Richards, Talcott Parsons and Peter Laslett, among others. The standard caricature of the ...”

“... enough roll call. You can read about it in Chapter 11 of Moser, or in Alice Kaplan’s Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis (2012) – highly recommended. From Paris, it was on to New York. Meeting Partisan Review’s co-editor William Phillips at a party, Sontag, now a single mother living on a ...”

“... the Charing Cross Road’. Occasionally, the day’s work done, he goes to pubs and meets poets: David Wright, ‘a literary instrument of precision’, and a long-time friend and supporter; Patrick Kavanagh, who was to be approached ‘with a large whisky in one’s outstretched hand’; George Barker, first seen ‘wearing a check suit and cap, all very ...”

“... But his development of this appeal to recent history does not turn out very happily. He cites David Marquand as an influential exponent of the view that Britain’s cultural conservatism in the 20th century was the result of an ossification of the values of liberal capitalist individualism which had served their turn and had had their day. ‘Such a view ...”

“... good Opinion her Passion has made her conceive of him’); Sarah Fielding’s deeply unpleasant David Simple (1744), in which characters with names like Spatter, Lady Know-All and Mr Varnish assail the gormless hero until he drops dead of despair; and Sarah Scott’s thoroughly demoralising Millenium Hall (1762), on the supposed consolations of living in a ...”

“... character in Apocalypse Now mournfully observes; but one sometimes wonders. In Out of the Sixties David Wyatt argues that Vietnam remains ‘the defining thing, our war, our story’, and he compares it to an iceberg, ‘a mostly submerged history that cruises through our dreams’. Oddly though, he in the end makes very few connections between the work of ...”

“... are perceived’, and it’s this faculty which malfunctions in Hartman’s more fanciful flights. David Simpson’s central subject is indicated by Hartman’s passing remark about Wordsworth’s ‘residual agrarian sensibility’. Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination is his second book on Wordsworth, following and complementing Wordsworth and the Figurings ...”

“... After much thought, Baretti commissioned the music from François-André Danican Philidor, the French operatic composer (celebrated also for his prowess at chess). Philidor worked in Paris on what was to be his major choral work, advised by no less a figure than Diderot. Baretti translated Horace’s Latin with an equally distinguished assistant: Samuel ...”

“... the war, the publication in Wheels of Wilfred Owen’s poems, the 1919 Exhibition of Modern French Art. Their snooty irreverence had made postwar England feel young again, so D.H. Lawrence is said to have said (although in making Osbert the model for Lord Chatterley, Lawrence may have been seeking to modify his celebration). In the social climate of the ...”

“... when he encountered them among Hebridean chiefs. But Auchinleck’s Scotland, for all the David Humes and Adam Smiths and Hugh Blairs, still had one foot in times when family feuds were settled by the spear and the firing of houses. To the old taunt, Boswell’s guts responded in the old way. Meanwhile Boswell went on wrestling vainly with his own ...”

“... publish an experimental result that confirmed my own rather than my acquaintance’s theory. The French biologist André Lwoff wrote: ‘L’art du chercheur c’est d’abord de se trouver un bon patron.’ To me, this means one who suggests good ideas, helps his students along without spoon-feeding or domineering, gives them public recognition for their ...”

“... which eventually included C.L.R. James and the Sino-American, Grace Lee Boggs; free of the French Communist Party, he managed to avoid embroilment in the latter’s dizzying volte-fesses, chronicled by Sartre in Les Mains sales. He sided with the Algerian rebels against his adopted homeland and with the Hungarian uprising, having long since repudiated ...”

“... by tracing a line through Derrida, Barthes and the later Blanchot to a reading of the upheavals in French literary culture precipitated by the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria and by the events of May 1968. As Barthes declared in 1977, these upheavals marked the final demise of the sacrosanct nationalist ‘myth’ of the Great Writer as ‘the sacred ...”

“... self. In Cooking with Mud: The Idea of Mess in Nineteenth Century Art and Fiction, David Trotter, the author of several other books about 19th-century writers, proposes what he calls ‘mess-theory’ (and, as a corollary, ‘litter-theory,’ which he regards as the point at which ‘waste’ and ‘mess’ overlap). Trotter’s main argument ...”

“... of Roman water did, a vast and clever system that harnessed rivers and used canals and pipes. For David Sedlak, who divides the past, present and future of water into four ages, this was the beginning of Water 1.0, when the Roman model – sewers to remove dirty water and clean pipes to supply it – was copied in European cities. Drinking-water treatment is ...”