“... 1960s were a great era of collage in all sorts of media: not just Robert Rauschenberg, but also John Ashbery and Bob Dylan. For Barthelme, it wasn’t simply a matter of playing with found forms or language. That was ‘cheapo surrealism’. Instead his stories explore situations (‘The Party’, ‘Brain Damage’, ‘City Life’) that are experienced as ...”

“... invention. In the new universities and colleges of the 19th century, where literary criticism took wing as an academic subject, literature and history were commonly taught together. The Shakespearean critic A.C. Bradley and the historian J.S. Brewer had chairs in literature and history. In the 1870s the subjects might have grown up as a single faculty at ...”

“... municipal gardens, bent over their spades and forks in regulation red hats and green waistcoats (John Major’s father was a gnome-fancier, founding Major’s Garden Ornaments in 1930). The arrival of concrete and then plastic saw their once fine features blunted for the mass market and today’s gnome population, Twigs Way tells us in Garden Gnomes: A ...”

“... While John Kasarda shares the title page of this scientific romance masquerading as a work of urban theory, Aerotropolis was written by Greg Lindsay alone. Kasarda, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s business school, may be a peculiar sort of Johnson, but Lindsay, a business journalist, is nonetheless his committed Boswell ...”

“... figure in the history of modernism partly because he did so little to promote himself. Before he took over the Dial, he wrote James Joyce a cheque for $700; it came to Joyce from his publisher with a note that read: ‘Please don’t imagine that America is full of rich young men of that kind!’ Thayer wasn’t modest, but he was discreet, especially ...”

“... career of a competent civil servant. A member of the king’s household and lifelong retainer of John of Gaunt, Chaucer served as a diplomat, controller of the wool custom, clerk of the king’s works, deputy forester, justice of the peace for Kent and Member of Parliament. In addition to his large poetic corpus, we have several prose works and a few ...”

“... he’d done more than anyone to establish was headquartered on the other side of the Atlantic. John Wyndham and Arthur C. Clarke, the most important British science fiction writers to emerge after the war, published in the pages of American magazines. Attempts to revive the domestic scene failed to gather momentum until 1954, when New Worlds – a former ...”

“... bread were put out for the poor. Some five thousand troops gathered, on horse and foot, as Sir John Strangways, a local royalist, proclaimed the end of eleven years of the republic. A contemporary source describes a procession of ‘maidens, at least a hundred in number’, dressed in white waistcoats and led by a woman beating a drum; ‘both ...”

“... in a wholesale way only once. It was dressed in stucco when new, under the general direction of John Nash. It formed the central portion of his grand north-south route from Regent’s Park to Carlton House (demolished in 1827, only a year after the building work in Regent Street was complete). The Victorians made inroads on Nash’s scheme; the Quadrant ...”

“... note: but nothing now can change the way I went indoors, chilled by the wind and made a fire and took down my book and opened it and failed to comprehend the harmonies of servitude, the grace music gives to flattery and language borrows from ambition – and how I fell asleep oblivious to the planets clouding over in the skies, the slow decline of the ...”

“... one.’ She looked me up and down. ‘Well, you’re still in one piece, at least.’ The remark took me by surprise, but I had to laugh. She was referring to an incident a few weeks earlier, when the fan had come on suddenly just moments after I had pulled my arm from the rotors. This wasn’t supposed to happen: according to health and safety ...”

“... Another time, he somehow got into it with several greasers late one night at a restaurant-dive. He took care of a couple of them but the third one got behind him and cracked him on the noggin with a piece of crockery. I forget how he got out of that one without a knife in his back, but he did find himself struggling with his statistics homework for a ...”

“... was shattered in the 1960s and 1970s, and under Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan American politics took a conservative turn. Democrats are still divided over how to respond.Today, an air of foreboding hangs over the party. Despite the rapid economic recovery from the pandemic, Joe Biden’s approval rating hovers around 40 per cent, and polls predict disaster ...”

“... music, French, ballet, gymnastics, tap-dancing, ice-skating, ‘even baton twirling’. They took out a loan to buy her a $13,000 piano, but they wouldn’t try to buy a house until she was grown up: ‘Condoleezza is our house,’ they would say. They tried enrolling her in school when she was three, in a class with children twice her age, but she cried ...”

“... novels, and the four volumes of memoirs, and the three volumes of journals, and the biography of John Aubrey, and the collected reviews and criticism. Anthony Dymoke Powell was born in Westminster on 21 December 1905 – a wintry rather than a Christmas baby. ‘It was because he was Welsh,’ Barber teases, ‘that Powell pronounced his name to rhyme with ...”