“... poetic sequence Modern Love, when she traumatised Meredith by leaving him for their artist friend Henry Wallis). Jane died in 1851, and Peacock’s record as a widower confirms the sense of desperation. The following year – emboldened at this point in his career by financial security – he proposed marriage to Claire Clairmont’s niece, a 27-year-old ...”

“... to lay down petroleum deposits – ‘on whose behalf,’ Calvino adds, ‘we do not know.’ James Joyce began his career as a social historian of ‘scrupulous meanness’, and ended up with Finnegans Wake, which is both an avatar of the Arabian Nights and a vast, impossibly prolix history of the world. Calvino, too, broadens out, his later work ...”

“... anarchists declared their support for Sinclair. Some screenwriters and an occasional actor (James Cagney, Katharine Hepburn) defied their studios and supported Sinclair; Rogers managed to conduct a running commentary on the campaign without ever taking sides. Will Rogers was the friend of the New York immigrant Jewish blackface comedian Eddie Cantor (he ...”

“... and momentous events is a familiar move in Boyd’s fiction. In The New Confessions (1987), John James Todd, a Scottish filmmaker, fights in the trenches, is pauperised by the Wall Street crash, witnesses the rise of Nazism in Berlin (where he attends parties with Fritz Lang and Thomas Mann), and arrives in Hollywood just in time to fall foul of ...”

“... also alleged that Corbyn had been ‘a paid informant’ and flattered Sarkocy as ‘a communist James Bond’. Inevitably, the Tories were by now enthusiastically clambering onto the bandwagon. First out of the traps was the brash young defence secretary, Gavin Williamson. The Sun’s report, he said, shows why Corbyn cannot be trusted: ‘Time and time ...”

“... humanity or justice those original occupants might have is a question that remains to be answered. Henry Reynolds, in his books The Other Side of the Frontier (1981) and Frontier (1987), argues that war, though undeclared, was indeed waged. For both sides, Aboriginal invisibility was a key, rendering white atrocities unaccountable but also hiding the guerrilla ...”

“... in the trenches during the First World War are familiar, but Rose has found a Glasgow woodcarver, James Murray, who responded to the horrors around him by carrying a different volume of poetry in his kitbag – Goethe, in the original. Reading could be uncontrollable in other ways. Female readers read books for boys without adopting ...”

“... his language – Podhoretz’s writing is almost always elegantly phrased and supple, closer to Henry James than to Damon Runyon – that he likes to announce his lower-class affiliations. There is a pattern of such sartorial signals, running from childhood to maturity. In Ex-Friends, he is proud to report a sartorial victory for his class during an ...”

“... is gothic in mood, but has a plainness and tact. Sometimes, in these pages, one wishes for what Henry James (apropos of Poe) called ‘the indispensable history of somebody’s normal relation to something’.The best​ of the stories stand out because they slip the noose and allow contingency into their version of things. Henri Thomas’s ‘The ...”

“... Macdonald, Philip Rahv and others. The Cold War hardliners, such as Melvyn Lasky, Irving Kristol, James Burnham, Sidney Hook and later Norman Podhoretz. The ‘End of Ideology’ liberal professoriat: Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Lewis Coser. And perhaps most enduring in their contribution, if only because they partook of all wings and of none, the ...”

“... batch of studies finds, in the USA, Peter Plan and T.G. Bishop combing the plays for miracles and James Biester finding the key to Renaissance courtly poetry in its strategies for eliciting astonishment. Back home, Jonathan Bate is gobsmacked by the sheer Genius of Shakespeare. It’s perhaps as well to remember that in cooler moments Jonson complained that ...”

“... religious history, of Jacobitism and the previous abortive attempts to restore the descendants of James II to the throne. Instead we go straight into a military encounter, the Battle of Prestonpans, on 21 September 1745. ‘Two armies were moving to contact in the country to the east of Edinburgh’ is the book’s first sentence: the armies are the Jacobite ...”

“... Mask album (1982) from Lou Reed, a student of Schwartz’s at Syracuse in the early Sixties. And James Atlas’s sensitive biography, published in 1977, provides an exhilarating mass of circumstantial evidence about Schwartz’s day-to-day existence. But the best introduction to his achievement remains his extraordinary first book. He really was onto ...”

“... to Harold Hayes’s soft-core liberal stronghold at Esquire, and from a Jesuit seminary to the Henry Luce Chair of American Culture and Public Policy at Northwestern University? At its worst, however, Wills’s book is merely a tawdry broadside, returning with too much pleasure to scandals uncovered by others with too little caution. The pilgrim dips his ...”

“... form and essence of culture. He is end and beginning, both cedar tree and ‘A per se’. And as James Kinsley suggests, Virgil’s best translators acquire something of his luminous stature: ‘the ancient author becomes culturally effective, and the translator a “noble collateral” with him.’ Henry Howard, Earl of ...”