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“... between Prufrock’s ‘overwhelming question’ (line 10) and the observation in Chapter 23 of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers that ‘The whole company were a good deal astounded with this overwhelming question’? Certainly Eliot’s mind was a vast, labyrinthine echo chamber, and perhaps more than any other canonical poet of the English ...”

“... foundations of success in popular music, what Hollywood was to films. Benny Goodman became the ‘King of Swing’ not only because Hammond talked this gifted man, then a disenchanted studio musician, into forming a band; Goodman took on a top-class black ex-bandleader as his arranger, devised a jazz sound rather than playing routine commercial dance-music ...”

“... the Department of English at Princeton, traces the Western’s obsession with masculinity from James Fenimore Cooper through Owen Wister, Zane Grey and John Ford to Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah. His subject is the well-known tautology that a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. For Mitchell, the Western novel is essentially theatrical – a stage on ...”

“... general public, through the South London hospital named for him. Maudsley is something of a demon king arriving on the scene, after his well-meaning predecessors. He became a dominant figure in medical psychology, but was disliked for his bleakly nihilistic view of the causes and care of insanity, as well as for his personal prickliness. He prided himself on ...”

“... usual swirls before pine’ – which White himself, in The Burning Library, traces to a poem by James Merrill. And the narrator of the novel has had jobs and written books identical to White’s own. As I have suggested, White is particularly interesting on the novel’s analogue to Forgetting Elena, but he also makes mild jokes about all the doubles of his ...”

“... Lord George Macartney, arriving on a trade mission and bearing gifts for the Emperor Qianlong from King George III (1793), was so impressed by the strong, diligent stevedores, ‘singing and roaring all the while’, and the healthy and agile women (who had plainly ‘not been crippled in the usual manner’: this was in the north of the country) that he could ...”

“... house.’ The extensive rioting and looting that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, although ostensibly a spontaneous expression of outrage, in some areas quickly lost its focus. One youth, asked why he was rioting, is reported to have said: ‘Because what’s-his-name was killed.’ Another rioter shouted that it was ‘early Easter ...”

“... most of the colonists, couldn’t see it, but to the ingenious theologians, anxious to serve their king and their Church, it seemed providential, precise and even practical. To Bartolomé de Las Casas, however, another Dominican, later Protector of the Indians and Bishop of Chiapa in Yucatan, the line was too fine. ‘False testimony, a contrived argument for ...”

“... in one or more demonstrations in the theatre at Dumfries in favour of the French and against King George – must be substantially true or Burns would not have had so much trouble apologising for it to his seniors in the Excise. While not taking Burns’s politics seriously, McIntyre judges them on grids provided by notional two-party ...”

“... But they were heard by men trained to understand nothing but the absolute sovereignty of the king-in-Parliament, and for whom ideas of federation or devolution, let alone self-government, were delusory or actively pernicious.Two centuries later, the Kilbrandon Report of 1973 shied away from any sort of federal solution, on the grounds that it worked ...”

“... Monarchy of Austria-Hungary) and now has, in English, an almost entirely new oeuvre to the one James Wood wrote about here soon after he died (and I wrote about in the TLS).* For a dead foreign writer to be allowed to carry on in this way is, to say the least, rather unusual. At that time, Wood wrote about a great comic writer, and I about a man whose best ...”

“... child self reading ‘The Tree of Justice’ in Rewards and Fairies, the old madman brought before King William by Rahere the Jester revealed as Harold Godwin, and Hugh, the Saxon knight, kneeling to him. And ‘each time,’ writes Inglis, ‘the queer, crisp ripple of excitement tingled along my spine; the brimming tears which never quite fell, the chokey ...”

“... in Polaroids from the Dead (1996), Coupland writes about the day in 1970 he saw a reproduction of James Rosenquist’s F-111 in the school encyclopedia. ‘Warhol said that once you saw the world as Pop, you could never look at it the same way ever again. Absolutely true. Early family memory: young Douglas cutting up Life magazines bought for 25 cents apiece ...”

“... decades later: ‘I own myself indebted to Sir William Temple for recommending me to the late King, although without success, and for his choice of me to take care of his posthumous writings.’ So what about ‘Stella’: Esther Johnson, a girl of eight when Swift first met her in Temple’s household in 1689, thought by credible witnesses to be ...”

“... defined the ‘atmosphere in the cab’, they often date badly. The student of elevator scenes in James Bond movies, for example, will discover only that while Daniel Craig in Quantum of Solace (2008) instantly unleashes a crisply definitive, neoliberal backwards head-butt, Sean Connery in Diamonds Are Forever (1971) has to absorb a good deal of heavy ...”