“... 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 ...”

“... let alone courtliness. Life is now a teeming Holiday Inn. It’s striking that American English comes to play another of its tricks here, and makes ‘checking-out’ slang for ‘dying’. As for Eberhard, most readers will give up after an early salvo of ‘operational definitions’, ‘intromittent organs’ and ‘genitalic contacts’. Which ...”

“... before I bring him into St Mark’s Place, would imagine himself for a little time in a quiet English cathedral town.’ ‘Think for a little while of that scene, and the meaning of all its small formalisms, mixed with its serene sublimity. Estimate its secluded, continuous, drowsy felicities’; and, having done so, enter St Mark’s Place, where ...”

“... historical vision. Like Kafka, whose work she played a major role in having translated into English, she used matter-of-fact prose to dramatise a ‘nightmare world’ in which arbitrary decrees are palmed off as sacred laws. For better or worse, Arendt’s vision long ago lost its shocking novelty. Thanks to the memoirs of survivors like Jean ...”

“... outwitting Leavis about the meaning of Empson’s ‘Legal Fiction’, and declaring his ‘un-English’ refusal to accept Shakespeare’s ‘essential “greatness”’. And according to Hawkes, Wittgenstein’s remark implies not only that Shakespeare’s reputation results from conventional praise rather than any inherent value, but that ‘no text ...”

“... in Austin, Texas, undoubtedly at the initiative of Professor Wm Roger Louis, whose Kerr Chair of English History and Culture at the University of Texas was one of the two principal sponsors (along with the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library), although the president and staff of the hyper-rich Pennzoil Company and sundry U of T outfits are also thanked for their ...”

“... other; indeed, I made my own grammar of the poetic dialect as I went along.’ A century later, Richard Bentley – the founder of historical philology who took Scaliger as his model – used his own granular mastery of Greek literature to show that the letters ascribed to the tyrant Phalaris must be a later composition. His critics at Christ Church replied ...”

“... But the winning political coalition forged by FDR was shattered in the 1960s and 1970s, and under Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan American politics took a conservative turn. Democrats are still divided over how to respond.Today, an air of foreboding hangs over the party. Despite the rapid economic recovery from the pandemic, Joe Biden’s approval rating ...”

“... refused access.Biographies convince us by being authoritative rather than objective. The musician Richard Witts, whose biography of Nico was published in 1993, was asked by her to write her life. She wanted him to make it like a novel and he did, dramatising postwar Berlin, Paris in the 1950s, New York and London in the 1960s and 1970s, Manchester in the ...”