“... in London. Contact with Hale eventually resumed. In 1927 he told a friend (a fellow American, William Force Stead): ‘I had a letter from a girl in Boston this morning whom I have not seen or heard from for years and years. It brought back something to me that I had not known for a long time.’ In October 1930 she came to tea in London. Vivien liked her ...”

“... reinscribes the theory. When Terry Eagleton, for instance, in his erratic and self-regarding William Shakespeare,† declares that ‘from a phallocentric viewpoint a woman appears to have nothing between her legs,’ and sets up his account of the great tragedies by stressing man’s ‘unconscious thoughts of his own possible castration’ – so that ...”

“... woman, Florence Barger, as confidante. All this is fair enough; Forster, when he agreed first that William Plomer and then P.N. Furbank should write his biography, did not ask that matters of this kind should escape discussion. He lived the greater part of his life under a hated law that banned and might brutally punish his kind of sexuality; it long blighted ...”

“... of the postbellum Soviet treatment of Germans in the eastern territories, voiced again recently in James Bacque’s Crimes and Mercies. How high the seas of humbug swell. Like Madagascar, the ‘Frankfurt’ School – at least in its first incarnation – was a toponymic anomaly. Marcuse barely had time to check out of the luggage reclaim in Frankfurt after ...”

“... of the sentences seem tackier than it would in a Chandler story. Somewhere in the background is James M. Cain, the author of the novel on which the film is based. And the actual writer here, the one who finally approved the words even if he didn’t compose them, is Billy Wilder, the director of the film, and co-author of the script. ‘He was a ...”

“... Hardly any good poems came out of the conflict in Vietnam and most of those were written by James Fenton, a poet alert to the eerie surrealism of war. What happens when the war is banished from the front page and into the history books? Pound said, in the ABC of Reading, that ‘literature is news that STAYS news.’ Eliot, on the other hand, was less ...”

“... being wrong. Some of them Gould himself puts right. Take the case of the late-18th-century thinker James Hutton, whose Theory of the Earth was a milestone in the emergence of modern geology because of the systematic manner in which he interpreted earth history in terms of causes which could be seen to be acting in the present. Cyclic processes of ...”

“... Landor from Lyttelton; nor really about Ibsen either, though Lyttelton is prepared to like Henry James (more when older than as a young man), and wholly accepts the poetry of Hart-Davis’s personal friend, Edmund Blunden. Hart-Davis thinks Maugham ‘the most over-praised GOM since Bridges’, but, while not denying Lyttelton’s suspicion that Maugham was ...”

“... and obliged to accept whatever terms his employer thinks fit to impose’. Similarly, the engineer William Fairbairn saw that the division of labour in the factory meant that ‘the designing and direction of the work passed away from the hands of the workman into those of the master and his office assistants.’ Berg moves adroitly between the formal ...”

“... pale Hawksmoor is an inhabitant of the present day who reminds one not only of Dyer but of P.D. James’s recurrent character Inspector Dalgliesh – one of her novels, A Taste for Death, published the following year, has a church murder in London, draped in the poses of this sensitive, cultivated policeman, and it also has, like Hawksmoor, a suspected ...”

“... from 1951, features Margaret Lockwood (best known for playing feisty period heroines opposite James Mason, who himself did Desert Island Discs in 1961 and 1981) sounding as if she’s narrating a public information film: the Eton boating song ‘conjures up for me a very pleasant English scene’.When the BBC switched to recording on tape, which could be ...”

“... The problem is not that Babel Tower or A Whistling Woman ‘smells of the lamp’, as Henry James famously complained of Eliot’s historical scholarship in Romola, but that the proliferation of vocabularies and allusions – not to mention the sheer number of characters, many of them introduced in previous volumes – sometimes threatens to bury the ...”

“... villagers called her a moll heron, ‘all legs and wings’. Later, having read Freud and Henry James, she hinted at a ‘restricted’ upbringing, but she found refuge in her surroundings as well as her books. Lark Rise has some excellent descriptions of the Oxfordshire countryside, interrupted from time to time by the voice of young ...”

“... instead to a new ideal – one that would consume his fortune and destroy his reputation. James Clerk Maxwell’s four field equations, published in 1865, had unified electricity, magnetism and optics, and predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves moving through space at the speed of light. In 1886-87 the German physicist Heinrich Hertz ...”

“... shifting sensibilities. His verbal brocade and fairy-tale diction were always an acquired taste; James Dickey called him ‘one of the most unpityingly pretentious poets I have ever come across’. But these days the kind of poetry he wrote – extravagant in ambition, mantic in mood, unironic in the extreme – is about as popular as trade unions and Cuban ...”