“... to the structure and to the theme of Stolen Lightning. This is not a book that describes magic – Paul Daniels and his friends in the Magic Circle can rest easy. Instead, it is a book that celebrates a kind of magic, the magical arcana of high social science. As the author frequently points out, modern sociology and anthropology have been dominated by the ...”

“... incantation, Orphic music: all moved him into the frenzy necessary for self-dissolution.Edward Wilson-Lee’s The Grammar of Angels takes up Pico’s interest in ecstatic states. It’s not a biography of Pico (too bad, since we could do with a fresh one in English) but a wide-ranging cultural history of mesmeric sound, from Plato to the ...”

“... church felt itself to have been visited by the Holy Spirit, and to be making fresh use of what St Paul called ‘spiritual gifts’ or ‘the manifestation of the Spirit’: speaking in tongues, dancing in the spirit, ecstatic worship, healing, miracles, prophecies. This movement had its roots in American worship. It blew through many parts of the Church of ...”

“... true that Partridge had no philological training to speak of. But ‘the word king’, as Edmund Wilson once called him, did not need it. The title is itself a linguistic masterpiece. Academically, it throws down the gauntlet to the orthodox lexicographical establishment, represented by Murray’s successors at Oxford, while at the same time conveying to any ...”

“... middle-aged, middle-class anxieties with the nine stories in Georgina Hammick’s Spoilt. Angus Wilson’s name has been mentioned in comparison, but these pieces have none of the acidity and satiric hardness of Wilson’s early short stories. Their sheen, style and deliberate under-statement are much nearer the New ...”

“... toilet paper’. In December 2016 the Northern Ireland Executive’s minister for communities, Paul Givan, withdrew funding from an Irish language group which intended to spend the money on children from disadvantaged families. Soon afterwards, Sinn Féin’s deputy first minister, Martin McGuinness, resigned, bringing down the executive; he blamed the ...”

“... of biomass over biodiversity, environmentalism over ecology proper. Apologists for what Edward O. Wilson has termed ‘the prosthetic environment’ picture nature as a controllable steady gate – a model which lends itself to idioms drawn from good housekeeping (knowing what is in the global larder) and good living (the environment as still-life, as ...”

“... his relation to his age has always been self-divided. He said he had no relation to it. Edmund Wilson wrote in 1938 that the poems ‘went on vibrating for decades’, despite their lethal pastoral of condemned men and suicides, soldiers and doomed lovers, their stopped clock of velleities and arrested intimacies. The poems have often been mothballed as ...”

“... behind the door with a cosh and a dildo. He even had the galley of his Times obit for Harold Wilson nicked by a smarter than usual short-stay guest, who flogged it to Private Eye. Any intelligence service reposing confidence in Tom’s discretion and silence, in other words, would have had to be even more cretinously incontinent about secrecy than we ...”

“... this: ‘all of her so lovely and never even been for a walk.’ Quite soon, she is contemplating Paul Treece, the Rupert Brooke figure, and thinking: ‘I wanted to kick him.’ Whom one meets is a matter of luck, as Polly reflects at the end of the novel; and the men who come her way – it could be Robinson Crusoe who is speaking – are ‘all duds or ...”

“... but, after all, sudden conversions occur. ‘Personally, I would have had the watchers out on St Paul for a long time if I had been in charge of the Christian secret service when he came blundering into Damascus yelling that he’d gone blind, and Christ was the Messiah.’ Railton does his work only too well and on the last page we see one of his younger ...”

“... by Kingsley Amis, Four Quartets, Brideshead Revisited, Nineteen Eighty-Four, William Cooper, Angus Wilson, Horizon, architectural Modernism and the Festival of Britain. Just as you think something important is going to be left out it turns up: the bourgeois intellectual love-affair with France, the nascent aspirations towards internationalism in art. It is all ...”

“... it included than for those it didn’t (Hemingway, Dewey, Mencken, Salinger, Thurber, Edmund Wilson, Nabokov) and for those who, having joined, resigned (Thomas Hart Benton, Lewis Mumford, John O’Hara, Yvor Winters, Ezra Pound). Nor was it famous for anything it actually did: for years its main business was merely to perpetuate itself by suitable ...”

“... of a world revolution of the common man, aimed at a new world of plenty and security’. Paul Addison, in Now the war is over, an excellent book derived from a good TV series, sees Common Wealth as representing a ‘strand of socialist utopianism, to be found mainly among the professional middle classes, that ran through the Forties’. Yet Richard ...”

“... returned to Washington in the summer of 2003 – having been sacked by Rumsfeld and replaced with Paul Bremer – he was taken to the White House. Informed by Rumsfeld that Bush had ordered his ousting, he was now going to be thanked by the president for his work. It had not been easy; he’d been constantly overruled by the Pentagon; he had been denied ...”