“... England 1918-51, which concentrated on the social history, now followed by the publication of the Ford Lectures delivered in Oxford in 2008, which concentrate on the political history. The story McKibbin tells, with predictable skill, is of the way the successful Edwardian alliance between the Liberals and Labour came to be followed by the disintegration of ...”

“... of the rise and present institutional character of English Studies. A similar case was argued by Peter Widdowson and his contributors in the ‘New Accents’ volume Re-Reading English. It is hardly surprising that their arguments were met with great hostility by those (not only ‘Leavisites’) who continue to believe in the vital role of English as a ...”

“... of the child behind the man, Mandelson’s short-trousered induction into political life. Boy Peter on a Hovis bicycle! That was the madeleine moment in an interminable chronicle of not-saying, arcane rituals of grazing and trouser-changing unmatched since Roberto Rossellini made The Taking by Power by Louis XIV for French television. Triggered by an ...”

“... of Shakespeare, Leavis was supremely uninterested in the theatre, yet the theatre directors Peter Wood and Trevor Nunn (in the same year as Ellis) were his students, and others like Peter Hall went to his seminars and admired him. Above all his influence was exercised via the students who became teachers, mostly in ...”

“... a ‘legendary period in movies’. In The Last Picture Show, Welles’s friend and protégé Peter Bogdanovich had made ‘a film for everybody’. The Godfather was an ideal merging of ‘commerce and art’. Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets was ‘a triumph of personal filmmaking’ and a gripping thriller. For Sontag, these films were merely a case of ...”

“... an even greater claim to newness. But what about the loose network which connected Crane, Conrad, Ford, Wells and James? What about the Auden Gang? Both sets of writers have been the subject of group-biographies which, like Brown’s, delineate rivalries and influences. To acknowledge such examples would he to dispel some of the glamour surrounding the Men of ...”

“... of sentimentality which makes his fate unexpectedly poignant. Whistling the opening riff to Peter and Gordon’s ‘I go to pieces’, he spends his remaining hours arguing with a subway ticket inspector, in the launderette, and – a favourite pastime of Murakami’s characters – watching the clock, wondering if there isn’t really something he ...”

“... is light years on the go/From far away and takes light years arriving.’ Murray’s biographer, Peter Alexander, makes the striking claim that Murray had the poorest background of any English poet since Keats. Enough to bend anyone not double – which is a misnomer really – but half. One might as well go for an astronaut. And yet Heaney is ...”

“... over the course of his short life and when he finished smoking his last Pall Mall he got into that Ford of his and slammed it into a wall somewhere and killed himself and listen up Vladimír! He was only 44 years old and not even his wife Lee Krasner could help him not even his energy made visible drip painting not even his loyal doggy could help him Vladimír ...”

“... Williams he said that ‘even his good critical remarks sound as if they had been made by Henry Ford’; of Edith Sitwell’s then fashionable poems that they ‘sound as if Madame Blavatsky had written them for a Society of Latterday Druids’. In a sonnet series by Conrad Aiken ‘any similarity between the poems and reality is purely coincidental: they ...”

“... genre. The founders of the firm absorbed, among much else from their period, the lessons of Henry Ford and product standardisation. The ‘stable’ principle goes together with the essentially patriarchal organisation of Mills & Boon, which has always been run from the top by (Alpha) men. These are romances written for women by women for men. The two ...”

“... the grave on how the work should be published. In a forthcoming essay on Walpole as an historian, Peter Sabor comments on the way that ‘the preposterously Gothic arrangements by which Walpole preserved his history unread until generations after his death played into the hands of expurgators, conflators, and hostile commentators.’ Yet the passages now ...”

“... for their private collections. Compared with their modern counterparts, scholars funded by Mellon, Ford, Guggenheim and the British Academy, the Dilettanti had a striking characteristic: they were not so much specialists as universalists. By the time Knight joined it, the Society was absorbing the fruits, not only of archaeological discoveries at Pompeii and ...”

“... my aunt brought Patrick to the London flat, our daughter Candy was already three months old.’ Peter Pan had the windows locked against him when he tried to go home and saw a new baby in his cot; at least they let Patrick in. But Johnnie was a journalist and six weeks after Patrick arrived, his paper sent him to Paris. ‘I went too but we left the ...”

“... Paxman), the Falklands War, Neil Kinnock, the Hitler Diaries and Bernard Ingham. A good friend of Peter Mandelson’s, he has long been close to the inner circles of New Labour. As well as there having been no pesky research to slow down the writing of the novel, there was also a strong imperative to publish it as soon as possible: Tony Blair’s topicality ...”