“... of as only partially understood. The Vedanta centre is where Isherwood began his training – in Richard Alpert’s expression, ‘to become nothing’. The world is seen as mad, and forces the weary traveller from Europe to subject himself to a difficult regime of retreat and quiet. A ‘homesickness for sanity’ is the one valid reason for putting oneself ...”

“... for children.The first episode of Wild Isles begins with footage from a drone swooping in over the English Channel towards the chalk cliffs of Old Harry Rocks in Dorset, both the shot and George Fenton’s orchestral score slyly reminiscent of the opening of The Sound of Music, though the solitary figure who gradually comes into view on the cliff edge is ...”

“... presented as the ‘most remarkable’ of the war diaries and even more boldly as ‘unique in the English language’. On the jacket is the boast: ‘Film rights sold to Thames Television’. One of the editors, Suzie Fleming, is described as a feminist, and the publishers were chosen because of a ‘commitment to the experiences of “ordinary” people, and ...”

“... loss. A true Don Quixote in his splendid madness offers scope for satire, not just for whimsy. Richard Graves’s The Spiritual Quixote, a predecessor of Greene’s novel and a feeble one, though now among the Oxford English Novels, at least made appropriate use of its Don as a means of satirising Methodism. And missing ...”

“... at the age of 19 and who has acted with almost all the great actors of the mid-20th-century English theatre. Having enjoyed romantic trysts with Yul Brynner at Cecil B. De Mille’s country retreat, committed adultery with Lawrence Olivier, married Rod Steiger and Hillard Elkins, a Hollywood producer with ‘sadistic’ sexual inclinations, had an ...”

“... music videos, an effect enhanced by guest appearances from Phil Collins, Willie Nelson, Little Richard, Miles Davis and many others. But the other, complementary theory of the series’ origin names a news story about vice cops using repossessed goods as a glossy cover for their assumed criminal characters. This is why Don Johnson drives a Ferrari and has ...”

“... and augmenting his haul with additional contributions from snares in the adjacent barley. If one English field needed armaments on that scale, what could be the state of that notoriously rabbit-ridden continent of Australia? Yet in the lists of Britain’s manufacturing exports you never read of Wednesfield’s specialised output, any more than you read of ...”

“... to paranoia. Not the paranoid style in American politics, to quote the title of a famous essay by Richard Hofstadter (how could anyone say farewell to a mode so lavishly on the rise?), but to the paranoid fictions that animated DeLillo’s own novels The Names (1982) and Libra (1988), and went all the way back to Pynchon’s V (1963) and The Crying of Lot 49 ...”

“... Americans against German cities. Americans come last chronologically, and also in intent, for as Richard Overy explains succinctly and well, the US saw the bombing of cities as a last resort and not the very first aim, as it was for Bomber Command. However, from Appendix 2 of the Hamburg police president’s report, which isn’t reproduced in the official ...”

“... mere ‘hack’ before he became a poet, as some have suggested (indeed his critical biography of Richard Jefferies, Wilson argues, is ‘a classic of the genre’); nor was he ‘grindingly poor’ (‘his earnings between 1906 and 1912 were about the equivalent of a university professor’s’); but ‘perhaps the most serious distortion of the Thomas ...”

“... book – written by dictation in the 1430s and often described as the first autobiography in English – as a powerful assertion of her self in the world. The self Margery describes is different from our modern understanding of that word, however, and not only because she appears, with perhaps feigned humility, as a mere ‘creature’. As Barbara Newman ...”

“... involves a break with Deconstruction. Norris argues in this book, as he has argued before, that Richard Rorty’s formalist reading of Derrida as a dissolver of truth and objectivity is wrong: Deconstruction may expose particular areas of aporia or vertiginous bewilderment in the logic of interpretation and explanation as these things are practised in the ...”

“... critic suddenly subservient to a cliché. As important to Hattaway is a vaguely Hillish view of English history. He believes that late Elizabethan drama drew its strength from a social solidarity dissipated under the Stuarts as class distinctions hardened up and the London theatre divided between coterie privacy and a Red Bull populism. As a ...”

“... like ‘loony Left’, a term invented by opponents. It is not likely that Coppe or Bauthumley or Richard Coppin would have assented to the sobriquet. As for the historians, perhaps Cohn, in The Pursuit of the Millennium, was a little credulous, since his thesis required that millennial sects be seen at their most crazy. But Morton, Hill and others have ...”

“... own grandiose language. The novel was first published in Italian in 1957, and soon after in English, Russian and other languages. It didn’t appear in Russia itself until 1987. Pasternak was awarded, and accepted, the Nobel Prize in 1958; and then bullied into refusing it after all. His second telegram, cited by ...”