“... marker that never quite blends with the elegiac intent. The boy in The Morning Watch is called Richard, but he is the same character as Rufus in A Death in the Family, now at the edge of puberty. The death of his father is mentioned and it is the same death: a car accident, a concussion, the mother saying they will not see their father ‘ever any ...”

“... relationships with his family, especially with his mother and with his proposed bride, his foster-sister Elizabeth, are also spelt out through his dreams, and this material has tempted some modern readers to conclude that the novel’s, and Frankenstein’s, other interests are all a distraction from the reality he is neglecting, the well-being and ...”

“... other ex-communists, also contributed to The God That Failed, a 1949 book edited by the Labour MP Richard Crossman. He went on to foster a series of CIA-funded seminars, populated by Encounter contributors, in the Austrian ski resort of Alpbach.Koestler’s adventurous past in the Spanish Civil War, along with his ...”

“... of Wagner’s racism can hardly be avoided. The Wagner circle and the intimates of Winifred’s foster-parents were among Hitler’s earliest supporters. Hitler himself acknowledged the role of Klindworth’s friend Heinrich Class, writing: ‘Politically, we stand on the shoulders of the Pan-German League.’ Another friend, Helene Bechstein, whose salon ...”

“... because she is variously Toni Morrison, Cy Twombly, Susan Sontag, Cindy Sherman, Susan Howe, Richard Hell, Clarice Lispector, Bob Dylan and Edie Sedgwick. (Not an exhaustive list – and if it doesn’t cohere, well, the Zelig-like career of an artist like X isn’t meant to.) Not all the references to currently working writers in the footnotes seem ...”

“... died hating her for becoming what she most wanted to be. Molly was at that time in love with Bo Foster, an intelligent woman ten years her senior. Bo, however, still lived with her parents and, while there was no doubting her desire for Molly, insisted on absolute discretion. She wasn’t about to set up house with another woman. Marriage began to look to ...”

“... men were caught breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in June 1972, Richard Helms, then director of the CIA, refused to help with the cover-up. In February 1973, after his re-election, Nixon fired Helms and replaced him with James Schlesinger. In an initiative to regain public trust as the crisis escalated, Schlesinger announced ...”

“... ballad-mongers and historians combined to give him his unsupported date in the time of King Richard’s exile, his wholly bogus aristocratic status as a dispossessed heir to the earldom of Huntingdon, and, somewhat incongruously, a greatly enlarged corpus of unashamedly plebeian opponents with an ever-increasing tendency to improve on the potter’s ...”

“... forerunners and precedents constituted the historiographical task. In Masters, Unions and Men Richard Price takes issue with this approach, which he identifies specifically with the work of the doyen of current practitioners, Henry Pelling. ‘Inconsistent even in the explanations that it does adduce to explain the rise of labour, traditional labour ...”

“... It amounts to an intriguing attempt to move beyond the single-issue programme of the LCS and to foster a popular radical literary culture of an ambitiously general kind. After a few months, however, the magazine began making a loss, and this, together with the declining membership subscriptions and the cost of defending its members put on trial by the ...”

“... slow swing replaced by a nocturne. The station cut in again with a learned authority, ‘Professor Richard Pierson, famous astronomer’, direct from the Princeton observatory to explain the discharge and point out that Mars could not support intelligent life. Pierson, however, confessed that he could not explain the regularity of the emissions. More ...”

“... beween living national languages, like German, and dead languages like French. Fichte, a kind of Richard Wagner of linguistics, rejected such Latinate words as Humanität, Popularität, Liberalität, spread by the effete French and their revolution. Instead, he believed in coining vigorous, native words, expressing the living German soul. Watanabe makes the ...”

“... as an unmarried mother who had gone out alone to a bar late at night. This woman (played by Jodie Foster in The Accused) was finally hounded out of town by the general opinion that a no-good woman – a woman who had been asking for trouble – had disgraced the proud Portuguese community of New Bedford. Benedict points out that the earliest reporting of rape ...”

“... Lyndon Johnson is alive. James Jones is alive. Jim Morrison and Robert Penn Warren are alive. Richard Nixon is dead; and a Soviet-bloc skier named Ivana Trump – someone overhears Sixties psychic Jeanne Dixon saying – will assign her name to a novel she does not write with the full and worldwide backing of one of America’s largest publishing ...”

“... past (golliwog-baiting, or calling an underprivileged boy a ‘ragamuffin’), or which fails to foster braininess in the reader. As far as the latter is concerned, it is surely impossible to estimate the retarding effect of low-grade literature. On the credit side, we have the testimony of Joseph Connolly, book-dealer and author of Children’s Modern First ...”