“... Lawrence is said to have said (although in making Osbert the model for Lord Chatterley, Lawrence may have been seeking to modify his celebration). In the social climate of the late Thirties, it was convenient to forget them, but they had done some things that were worth remembering. Thus, with the Reynolds News affair, the wish to set the Sitwells to one ...”

“... of theory to more concrete issues in social and constitutional history, provides the theme for David Runciman’s modestly titled but far-reaching book. Runciman’s study deals not with pluralism in its current, largely sociological, sense of ethnic, cultural, sexual and lifestyle diversity, but with pluralism in its early 20th-century political sense ...”

“... intended to be didactic as well as representative.’ Though the things anthologies make happen may be confined to poetry, the representative and the didactic are hard to tell apart. These two anthologies, eclectic, open-minded books, covering the same period if not always the same ground, appeared from big publishers within a month of each other. Each ...”

“... expansively to be useful. Even to list the things that affect women’s lives disproportionately may be to include too much, given the tendency for those at the bottom of social hierarchies to suffer more from everything, whether famine or plague or economic recession. There are all sorts of problems in the world, and feminists must focus their energies. To ...”

“... between Collier and her friend Sarah Fielding, author of the sentimental novel The Adventures of David Simple (1744) and contributor to her brother Henry’s Joseph Andrews (1742). They had worked together before – Collier wrote a preface for the 1753 sequel to David Simple, and in 1749 they both produced critical ...”

“... of trench warfare did not shock Rosenberg into poetry or make him see more clearly. The war may have accelerated his poetic development as much as it cramped its production, but it did not fundamentally change its course. Like that of his longer lived contemporary David Jones (born five years after Rosenberg, in ...”

“... is not the first British poet to have been keen on boxing and, apparently, quite good at it: we may think of Lord Byron and Robert Graves. But few others, surely, have written and worried so concernedly about the ethics of this sport, its moral justification. Ring of Truth, his first novel since The Big Time in 1965, returns hungrily to Scannell’s old ...”

“... and political platform for Labour, has been elaborated with the help of Tony Blair’s adviser, David Miliband, and sees Blair’s election as leader as an epochal event, finally settling Labour’s commitment to social democracy. All of which sounds very much as if Hutton hopes to become a key adviser in a future Blair administration, though the Tories ...”

“... The most enthusiastic moment came when David Cameron promised to end poverty and pronounced the Tories the real party of the poor. The Conservatives have, of course, always thought themselves the real party of the poor but this time the claim was accompanied by some genuine rhetoric about inequality which they may come to regret ...”

“... shabby universe reeking of the small screen and a low budget. But then what else would we want? It may be that this all seems so authentic only in the light of the gloss and spaciousness of the new film; but even so, the seediness works, as does the leisurely pace of the series, and I found myself wondering whether television as a medium, a set of small square ...”

“... In July last year, two months after assuming his duties as minister for universities and science, David Willetts granted university status to BPP University College of Professional Studies, making it only the second private institution in England, after the University of Buckingham, to be given the power to award degrees ...”

“... enjoyment’) or insulting Joshua Reynolds (‘This Man was Hired to Depress Art’). A few may have been excited by the promise addressed to Christians at the top of one of the Jerusalem plates: I give you the end of a golden string, Only wind it into a ball; It will lead you in at Heavens gate, Built in Jerusalems wall. The great Northrop Frye, in ...”

“... critic says he does, and indeed that’s part of the transaction. While the critic’s response may not be fully our own, it is an ideal proxy, a model for what our response might be. Of course Winckelmann’s tone, his language of sensibility, is not what we ask from art critics now (though it is sometimes what we get). But that voice of witness still ...”

“... The death of Dennis Potter may have been authored by God, but it was adapted for television by Potter himself. It began after a brief report in the Guardian suggested that Potter’s terminal cancer related to his lifelong addiction to nicotine. By return there was a gleeful letter from Potter revelling in the Potteresque fact that far from his ‘beloved cigarettes’ being the culprits, his forthcoming death from pancreatic cancer was probably iatrogenic: the result of years of lethal medication ...”

“... was a poet who liked jokes. That’s not unusual in itself, but she also wrote on topics that may disgust you, or ones that you may think funny poetry ordinarily has no right to address: disease, decay, physical humiliation and several kinds of disability, among them her own. In 1988 she learned that she had multiple ...”