“... roster of American writers, including Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Philip Roth and Garry Wills – whose analyses of Nixon, Reagan and Wayne blazed the trail for Nixon at the Movies – took him on as a character. Pundits have searched for literary antecedents (Uriah Heep, Tartuffe, Richard ...”

“... what he set out to do as a serious youngster devoted to the piano, classical as well as jazz.Thomas ‘Fats’ Waller – ‘Tom’ or ‘Thomas’ to his friends and family – had formidable technique, akin to a great athlete’s, and an exhaustless inventiveness and capacity to delight. His articulation of notes was ...”

“... to peculiar uncanny tales, she finds illumination in the modern novel, quoting from D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy and Ford Madox Ford. Meanings for each of us are knotted into the meanings that others find in this novel or that play – a common wealth of thought unimpeded by linguistic borders. Shared stories – from the tragedies of ancient Greece to nursery ...”

“... the mid-1730s lobbied theatre managements to stage more Shakespeare; she had also encouraged Sir Thomas Hanmer, a former Speaker of the House of Commons, to prepare the Oxford edition of Shakespeare published in 1744, with a picture of the Westminster Abbey statue as a frontispiece. Nor were her artistic interests confined to Shakespeare: among those the ...”

“... Lady Diana Cooper and Viscountess Maidstone were photographed in contemplation and pearls, but Helen Lyons was captured backlit in a diaphanous white lace dress: as risqué and demure as Diana with the sun behind her legs. Muir has brought the original prints together, so one can appreciate the tints and crackles. The early photographs, from small ...”

“... cannot receive absolution because he refuses to obey Father Rank’s instruction to steer clear of Helen Rolt. If he takes Communion in his state of mortal sin, then he will damn himself, but he goes ahead anyway and receives ‘the pale papery taste of an eternal sentence on the tongue’. Christ soon reproaches him, speaking from the wafer lodged in his ...”

“... a hard diagonal across the picture plane – a line interrupted, or softened, by the figure of Helen, brightly lit and placed between them, there to remind us what the story is really about.Some reviewers disliked this re-weighting. According to Jacques-Philippe Voïart, the history painter Angélique Mongez’s prize-winning Alexander Mourning the Death ...”

“... The first has a polemical quality, for Keats has long been a favourite poet of the formalists, as Helen Vendler’s accomplished but airless study of the Odes has recently demonstrated. In fact, Keats was his own first ahistorical, anti-political interpreter: both in his letters and in his subtle redeployment of hitherto political themes, the codes of the ...”

“... to the full her talents as a close reader of word and image: one on the novel of ideas from Thomas Mann to J.M. Coetzee and Nicola Barker; the other on the creepily insouciant photographs of Torbjørn Rødland. In both cases, the gimmick’s compromised form seems like the only way to accommodate ‘“ideas” imported from criticism or ...”

“... affect them hypnotically, adding that he had done this himself, carefully choosing the minor poet, Thomas Hardy? Would Dear Reader bear with me while I retire to reread A Portrait now? I shall not delay him more than two seconds, as when one reads a cassette letter from a friend whereon he says he must halt now for lunch and resumes after two seconds ...”

“... a family as much as with a person, just as E.M. Forster did with the family of Bob Buckingham and Helen Schlegel does with the Wilcoxes in Howards End, thinking she has found a way of life to love, or a lost tribe to which she might belong. Whatever the anxieties, a writer’s style will often enough be a homemade affair, a mesh of material discovered and ...”

“... in which he protests her superiority to mythical heroines of every stripe, from Andromeda to Helen. However crazy her behaviour, she proceeded always with absolute confidence, brooking neither argument nor delay. Though she caused havoc almost wherever she went, for Graves these conflicts were evidence of her ineffable, otherworldly ...”

“... Ficciones (1962), which has translations by Kerrigan himself, Alastair Reid, Anthony Bonner, Helen Temple and Ruthven Todd? Or in Donald Yates and James Irby’s Labyrinths (1962), with translations mainly by Irby, but also by Yates, Kerrigan, L.A. Murillo, Dudley Fitts, Julian Palley, Harriet de Onis, John Fein? There are also the volumes, notably The ...”

“... in Italy, Wolfgang had formed a close friendship with an English violinist of his own age, Thomas Linley; and after his marriage, he and Constanze thought seriously about going to England on several occasions. In 1787, a group of their friends – including Nancy Storace, a young Italian/English singer who was the first Susanna in The Marriage of ...”

“... with the clouds scudding over the top. We passed into Scotland and saw a sign for Ecclefechan, ‘Thomas Carlyle’s birthplace’ as one of those brown signs reminded us. Karl thought the town might offer the chance of a sandwich. We slipped off the motorway and inched through the ordered trees to the town, which seemed like it had been put to sleep some ...”