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“... of redistributive intervention. But the flexibility of liberalism is also its strength. It is, as George Watson argues, a way of making choices, something that is not possible in either Marxist or Hegelian utopias. It prescribes a set of institutions, a framework for action to ensure what Rawls calls ‘justice as regularity’. But there is one ...”

“... the Edinburgh pavement and the causeway; and between the ghosts of the Edinburgh philanthropists George Watson and George Heriot. Fergusson’s poetics are naturally dialogic, confidently mixing genres, styles, Scots and English. This is apparent in another mode Fergusson is drawn to, the elegiac, or, often, the ...”

“... of taking sides. This does not mean, and the present book does not reveal, that, in the words of George Watson in a letter to this journal, ‘like Hitler, if less effectively’, he ‘purposed the death of millions’ when he imagined the defeat of the bourgeoisie. It does mean that we should be no less careful in weighing the matter of betrayal in ...”

“... No anthology offers us the full spectrum of Scottish poetry, but Roderick Watson’s comes closer than any other. This is the first big, general anthology to offer us work in Gaelic, Scots and English (note the word order) from the medieval period to the present. Catherine Kerrigan’s Anthology of Scottish Women Poets (1991), Douglas Dunn’s Faber Book of 20th-century Scottish Poetry (1992), and Daniel O’Rourke’s Dream State; The New Scottish Poets (1994) all offer work in the three languages, but, as their titles indicate, select from specific sectors of Scottish poetry ...”

“... and burning the groves with their bloodstained altars – a scene powerfully recapitulated in George Shipway’s novel of the occupation of Britain, Imperial Governor (1968). Hutton is sceptical about most of this, pointing out that several authors seem to be copying each other or sources now lost, that Pliny appears to have been ready to believe ...”

“... it is here that he diverges from the ineffective attack mounted by unthinking conservatives like George Watson in his recent The Certainty of Literature.* Rather than argue that there really are certainties, and thereby offer an easy target for anyone who knows perfectly ordinary modern theory of knowledge (as ...”

“... something intractable and frightening which lies at the diseased heart of European culture. George Steiner raised this matter some years ago when he observed in a letter to the Listener that the ‘obstinate puzzle’ is that Eliot’s uglier touches tend to occur at the centre of very good poetry. As Julius shows, neither Ricks in his comments on ...”

“... in the travel writer, who expounds the eucharistic mystery of place. Too easy, perhaps? Nicola Watson has moved the discussion on. In The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain, she argues that literary tourism is historically and geographically specific. It’s peculiar to the long 19th century and to the territory of its ...”

“... sure whether he should be making high claims for them or confessing to a guilty fondness. J.R. Watson’s The English Hymn is a far more ambitious book, charting the history of the English hymn from its origins in the metrical psalmody of Sternhold and Hopkins in the 16th century through almost to the present day. It is a work of distinction, written with ...”

“... identified the authentic or “real” one.’ Quite right too; and if any radical, misled by George Galloway’s description of Hitchens as ‘a drink-soaked former Trotskyite popinjay’, should suggest that this book was written out of vanity, he would surely be mistaken. A vain man would have taken care to write a better book than this: more ...”

“... it for a pittance, ‘because everyone just saw the mills as places of drudgery,’ says Margaret Watson, the deputy editor of the Dewsbury Reporter, and the child and niece of mill-workers. ‘They were blackened, ugly – who wanted them?’ Bed manufacturers and businessmen, mostly. Stephen Battye, a local businessman, turned Joseph Newsome’s redbrick ...”

“... to Lunch is himself the classic double agent, the turned man. He has a public persona as ‘Ben Watson’ (apologist for his nocturnal self, the crazed poet), columnist for the Wire, broadcaster, and author of the monumental and magnificent folly, Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play. Watson, if he wanted ...”

“... of a servant’. As a gloss on this we have, among other commentaries, the remarks of G.J. Watson in his study of 1979, Irish Identity and the Literary Revival. Joyce, as Watson reminds us, was with this image repudiating not only the fatuities of Victorian stage-Irishness as a literary mode, but also their glorified ...”

“... hostile (more stereotypical Englishness here) to ‘intellectuals’. As his former colleague George Watson observed, ‘The chief purpose of his critical writings, in a negative sense, was the discrediting of 16th-century humanism and 20th-century modernism, both of which he saw as dry, starved and stultifying.’ It says something about Lewis’s ...”

“... did most to shape the welfare state in modern Britain, I just might give the palm to Sir Alfred Watson. He would be an unconventional choice. Short, bald, unassuming, more at home with numbers than people, Watson is well and truly forgotten. But he had strong views on how social services should develop and be funded, and ...”