“... about this undoubtedly American poet. He is the justified sinner whom we meet in the fiction of James Hogg. And he is the superman, the Stavrogin, whom we meet in the fiction of Dostoevsky: the antinomian hero bent both on power and mischief and on the blessedness of the meek, so that he’s Prince Myshkin too, and it’s hardly surprising that he should ...”

“... fl. four million BC, ‘archaeological hoax’). Then comes Leir or Lear (supp. fl. c.820 BC, ‘king of Britain’), followed by several other equally doubtful types whose inclusion prompts the thought that although subjects must be dead to merit inclusion, there is no equally stringent requirement about having lived in the first place; even some very dodgy ...”

“... whose performances he sought, and how much was written by him. The obvious parallel is with James Macpherson, initially the editor of Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland and eventually the fabricator of Ossian’s epic poetry, which he ‘translated’ out of Gaelic into portentous English sort of verse. Tolkien was like a ...”

“... of his immediate family, had competed with one another to bring him the good news. As with a king, no one wants to be the bearer of grim tidings, but everyone wanted to be the one to say this was going to be huge. Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, phoned him early to report: ‘It’s happening.’ Jason Miller, his senior election ...”

“... ill, he was carried on a litter to the Hotel de Ville to acclaim the advent of the Citizen King, Louis-Philippe – who appointed him to the Conseil d’Etat, and gave him 200,000 francs to pay off his gambling debts. He died in December 1830, aged 63, too soon to witness the disappointments of the new regime. His funeral cortège, led by the ageing ...”

“... to work with primary materials rather than ‘to draw on the work of Nick Furbank and Francis King’. An honourable but mistaken decision, if only because much of Furbank’s book is primary material, especially in relation to the later years. A decent but I think inadequate response to my carping would be to cite the author’s own confession that for ...”

“... interests produced a potentially subversive treatment of republicanism in Sejanus: but he became James I’s court poet, and Paulin deals fairly brusquely with Jonson as a conservative monarchist. He is represented here by ‘To Penshurst’, with a gloss based on Raymond Williams which criticises the poem for concealing its politics behind apparently ...”

“... But the notion that a friendly press can deliver votes has never been very convincing. Cecil King wasn’t the first person to see that newspapers could accelerate or slow up a trend, but never reverse or create one. The popular press, as Koss notes, encouraged a volatile public opinion which it could provoke and stimulate but seldom guide once the ...”

“... stories of fictitious people in American films, and whose narrator is George Bailey – the James Stewart character from It’s a wonderful life. The family romance is the construction George Bailey discovers in, or reads into, the plots of the films noirs concerned: incestuous, adulterous, murderous and paranoid impulses are shown variously manifesting ...”

“... a private prosecution against the magazine on a charge of blasphemous libel because of a poem by James Kirkup it had published which described Jesus having sex with a variety of men, including Pontius Pilate. John Mortimer and Geoffrey Robertson appeared for the defence, but lost. Gay News was fined and its publisher given a suspended prison sentence. ‘I ...”

“... of the process of writing, she’s building a canvas as well as she is putting on the paint,’ James Taylor, another conquest, explained. ‘It’s never straight on.’ Mitchell’s lyrical indirection, the habit of thinking against conventional tropes, is an extension of what she calls her ‘perverse need for originality’, a manifestation of a ...”

“... Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972), which in its imagining of extremity is not as far from Eliot and Sir James Frazer as you might think. Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’ has an epigraph from Conrad (‘Mistah Kurtz – he dead’) and in the film Kurtz, not yet dead, reads from the poem. In the uncut version of the film, Peter Cowie tells us, Brando reads the whole ...”

“... to succeed in the small and still male-dominated enclave of SF, the talented woman who writes as James Tiptree Jr was obliged to keep her femininity a close secret.) In the 20th century, genre, or ‘category’, fiction has often enforced pseudonymy for the commercial reason that the author’s name must chime harmoniously with the product. Thus, in the ...”

“... Landor from Lyttelton; nor really about Ibsen either, though Lyttelton is prepared to like Henry James (more when older than as a young man), and wholly accepts the poetry of Hart-Davis’s personal friend, Edmund Blunden. Hart-Davis thinks Maugham ‘the most over-praised GOM since Bridges’, but, while not denying Lyttelton’s suspicion that Maugham was ...”

“... in 1967, she lay down next to his effigy in Montparnasse to confirm they were the same height, the king and queen of a rainy country.What they had in common wasn’t just masochistic moodiness, though there’s plenty of that in her verse, but the same galvanic experience of being in the world, as if she too was plugged into the ‘immense réservoir ...”