“... hero-worshipped Ronald Reagan. In his closing sentences this entrepreneur speaks of buying up some English newspapers in order to put me, and others like me, out of a job. I had a brief cackle on the telephone with the Spectator’s then-editor and filed it away under ‘department of empty threats’. I had much the same reaction after meeting a British ...”

“... theory. Given this comparative framework, we can begin to ask new questions about the English reaction to Darwin. Surely the most pressing task is to look at the socialist response at home. We already have pointers. Malcolm Kottler in his essay shows that even Wallace (who studied in Mechanics Institutes and socialist Halls of Science), supposedly ...”

“... half still-life, half interior, on his dust-jacket. The treasure-house created by the miniaturist Richard Cosway at 20 Stratford Place, Oxford Street is a case in point. Wainwright cites the 1821 sale catalogue of this collection, but not Hazlitt’s recollection of its ‘specimens of art, antiquarianism, and vertu, jumbled all together in the richest ...”

“... is caught and let loose for the pleasure of chasing it down again. With every chorus Bob Dylan and Richard Manuel lift their voices and then abandon them, stranding their words right at the edge of a cliff, suspending the sound in dead silence until the next verse begins. It’s a stark, shuddering effect, the pleasure cut like a heater in a cheap hotel ...”

“... and work as separate units. At worst, they read like a cross between R.D. Laing’s case-notes and Richard Aldington’s Imagism. At best, they have a force and integrity which none of the other poets associated with the Review, and few poets since, have come close to matching. The problem, as Hamilton concedes in his preface, is that these 50 poems encompass ...”

“... is successfully air-brushed by an elegant Post-Modern presentation. Mitchell, who teaches English and art at Chicago University, and is an editor of Critical Inquiry (the Debrett’s of cultural and critical studies), emerges from this book as a kind of ‘Pomosaurus’ or perhaps even a ‘thesaurus’ (a creature nimble with multiple meanings). The ...”

“... not rejoice at the vict-ories of the Boers or grieve about their defeats, after all they kill the English soldiers too’. But he couldn’t help it: ‘I am glad when I read about the defeats of the British, it cheers my soul.’ Russian conservatives were pro-Boer not only for the usual nationalist, anti-British reasons but because they thought the Boers ...”

“... Beckett’s first French novel. The cognates Muldoon finds for Beckett’s name are Old Irish and English, becc and boc, which sound like characters from one of the late plays. He neglects Beckett’s French Huguenot background, which the author himself used as a source of onomastics in the matter of his name. At one point in Eleutheria a disgusted spectator ...”

“... basis of Taylor’s admiration is the Chestertonian contention that Thackeray ‘was the greatest English writer’ – writer, you note, not novelist – ‘of the 19th century. And perhaps of all time.’ He rejects the ‘change of heart’ thesis and has little time for the ‘buried life’ approach. There is no extended analysis of the ...”

“... the infallible cure for athlete’s foot: all reproduce when passed from one person to another. Richard Dawkins has called such reproducing ideas ‘memes’. Runciman’s insight has been to see that Darwinian ‘things’ can also be whatever occurs when an individual finds him or herself to be a member of a group. What then occurs are ‘social ...”

“... and the crumbling of services on a scale that would have gladdened the ruralist heart of a Richard Jefferies. Five years ago, Roy Porter still diagnosed ‘a downward spiral of infrastructural and human problems that will prove hard to halt’. Yet now, when London has slipped way down the table of city-sizes and tours round the eerie magnificence of ...”

“... and John Morris (both of whom wrote elegant memoirs of Orwell at the BBC); he employed Nye Bevan, Richard Acland, J.B.S. Haldane, T.S. Eliot, Quintin Hogg, Bernard Shaw; he led a BBC party, that included Guy Burgess, to a special de-briefing by Stafford Cripps on his abortive mission to India. Working for the BBC gave Orwell the experience, however ...”

“... de Antonio, Henry Geldzahler, Andy Warhol, Robert Frank, Walker Evans, Tom Hess, Lisette Model, Richard Avedon, Marvin Israel, and the pop art collectors Robert and Ethel Scull.’ Bosworth’s concentration on the sex-and-society aspect of her subject’s life means that she rarely illuminates the work for us. There is, of course, a temptingly easy ...”

“... address the question of sexism in language, and to do so in terms of satire. He imagines that the English language evolved in such a way that pronouns and grammatical forms must respect the colour of the people referred to rather than their gender – not ‘he’ and ‘she’, but ‘whe’ and ‘ble’. He (or rather ‘whe’) then produces a resourceful ...”

“... and music patron Baron Gottfried van Swieten, the guardian angel of Mozart’s late style. Richard Taruskin accuses Stravinsky of lying about the original idea of The Rite of Spring, which was visual and frankly ‘Scriabinistic’ rather than purely musical. In various autobiographical statements Stravinsky dismissed the help of Nicholas Roerich in ...”