“... dystopias have always had on our imagination. Yet his objections carry weight, as the admirably frank Gibson (who has admitted that at the time of writing Neuromancer he neither understood computers nor had been to Japan) would probably be the first to acknowledge. For the crucial point about Gibson, despite plausible attempts to situate him alongside ...”

“... duly welcomed by a line of critics from Edmund Wilson to John Updike. There were exceptions. Joseph Warren Beach thought Auden’s textual shenanigans were treachery, Randall Jarrell thought Auden’s wit and elegance quite enjoyable up to a point – or rather, up to the point of their becoming needlepoint – but after that a pretty dispiriting ...”

“... première of The Birth of a Nation and after the respectable citizens of Cobb County lynched Leo Frank. (Stirred up by anti-semitic hysteria, an Atlanta jury wrongly convicted the Jewish pencil factory manager of molesting and murdering a white female employee.) Atlanta was the headquarters of the powerful Twenties’ Klan, which augmented the negrophobia of ...”

“... whose genius has gone?’ Lev Loseff asks in his poem ‘June 1972’; Loseff’s close friend Joseph Brodsky had left Leningrad that month. The question brings to mind the title of Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel, which soon came to codify a central preoccupation of the Russian intelligentsia. But in this instance it also raises the notion that the poet’s ...”

“... been no difficulty in showing that, in these memoirs as in her career, Thatcher has been neither frank nor humble. Mrs Thatcher appears to suffer from a quite advanced form of egomania, or megalomania, or both; and it is genuinely difficult for her not to see everyone else as either her opponent or an instrument of her will. The former are immediately ...”

“... remedied: see below). One otherwise favourable review which I hadn’t previously seen, by Frank McLynn in the Literary Review, contains a weird aside in which I am taken to task because I, a ‘contemporary Croesus’, presume to encourage young persons contemplating a career as ‘underpaid, sneered at and generally put upon’ as academic sociology ...”

“... poor, drought-stricken Hale County. Evans struck up a conversation with a tenant farmer named Frank Tingle. Tingle in turn introduced Evans and Agee to his brother-in-law Bud Woods, and to Bud Woods’s son-in-law Floyd Burroughs. Evans and Agee had found their subjects. The men all drove back to Tingle’s house, and Evans quietly set to ...”

“... in ‘an extravagant, eye-catching green robe, bought for him, in Tunis she thought, by his Aunt Frank on his first transatlantic trip’. Elective affinity was everything. As Williams said of Pound: ‘It took just one look and I knew it was it.’ Their relationship had a note of comedy in it: ‘He was impressed with his own poetry,’ Williams ...”

“... to.’ Many of the members of the Central Committee reached a similar goal by less disarmingly frank intellectual gymnastics. Even so, a number were roundly criticised by Dutt for indulging in ‘acceptance with reservations, that if it was general would leave the Party in a state of complete confusion and helplessness of ...”

“... Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research. Her book answers critics of Mistra who argue, as Joseph Jay did in the American Journal of Psychology in 2001, that ‘the studies of separated twins contain serious flaws, and the authors’ conclusions are questionable,’ and attempts to demonstrate the power of genetics to shed new light on human ...”

“... on the enduring influence of Buffonian ideas in 19th-century France, Nelson mentions Julien-Joseph Virey’s advocacy of selective human breeding under Napoleon. Virey, a mediocre scientist, was an effective populariser of the new pseudo-scientific discourse about the inequality of races. In the bombastic prose of Histoire naturelle du genre humain ...”

“... song, which might once have shocked his earnest Nonconformist followers, is at last treated with a frank and uncensorious common sense. Of the three, song is least uncontentious – though Gladstone’s delight in theatregoing brought him reproof more than once, notably when he waltzed off to a new play at the Criterion Theatre only days after the news reached ...”

“... Lazar at the Beverly Hills restaurant, the Bistro, in which the Dunnes were investors. In public, Frank Sinatra had verbally attacked Lenny Dunne. Yet Dominick was his real object – Lenny was being browbeaten for bringing in an outsider. A couple of weeks later, the Dunnes were at the Daisy – another hot place in town. Sinatra, his two daughters and Mia ...”

“... face an economic typhoon of unparalleled ferocity, the worst the world has seen since the 1930s. Joseph Conrad once wrote a book called Typhoon, and at the end he told people how to deal with it. He said: ‘Always facing it, Captain MacWhirr, that’s the way to get through.’ Always facing it, that’s the way we have got to solve this problem . . . I ...”

“... successfully publicised imperial atrocities and attracted multiracial crowds to its rallies, Joseph Murumbi (Kenyan, though not Kikuyu) broke with the movement over its uncritical response to Suez.Some conscientious objectors specifically refused to fight in colonial wars, though their chances of success at tribunals were greater if they argued that ...”