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“... cause, have meanwhile directed attention towards the existence of another Brando. The bulk of Lawrence Grobel’s Conversations derives from a 1978 Playboy interview (accorded after Hugh Hefner put up $50,000 to bail out the Indian activist Russell Means) and is presumably being published now as a kind of hors d’oeuvre to Brando’s autobiography, for ...”

“... century’s self-congratulatory belief in the West’s ‘civilising mission’, Huntington and Harrison have discovered that the West can keep on congratulating itself – not this time on its exportable civilisation, but on its particular culture. The disparity between the misery of others and our relative well-being has nothing to do with colonialism or ...”

“... Vane’ and ‘Randy Brooks’: and truth in it? And if there were? Do the recent revelations of Lawrence Durrell’s relations with his daughter alter our attitude to Durrell’s books? Our understanding of them? The revelations in question are substantial, by contrast with Korda’s roman à clef insinuation, and are so distressing that comparison may seem ...”

“... There are grounds for thinking Tony Harrison the first genuine working-class poet England has produced this century. Of course, poets from D.H. Lawrence to Craig Raine can boast a proletarian background, but their poetry isn’t usually interested in doing so – not at its most characteristic and not to an extent that would make the term ‘working-class poet’ a useful one ...”

“... a feast of raw flesh to be eaten by initiates. Their experiment is informed by Jane Harrison’s researches into the figure of Bacchus and the ‘thiasos’, his band of ecstatic worshippers. Harrison had read her Nietzsche and set off in pursuit of the ‘darker, older’ shapes to be glimpsed behind the ...”

“... a sense of darkness encroaching and irresistible. One quotation, significantly, comes from Jane Harrison, the classical scholar invoked by Virginia Woolf at the beginning of A Room of One’s Own. Butts, like Forster and Woolf, was deeply interested in Harrison’s writings, especially her Prolegomena to the Study of ...”

“... is a faith that invites more seductively than most the attention of the historian, and Professor Harrison, noting some very peculiar manifestations of it in the period of the Napoleonic wars and the succeeding years, has found himself a very good subject. He speaks of himself as writing ‘popular’ history and examining the ‘structure of popular ...”

“... In the end, alongside HD, Sayers and Woolf, Wade decided to concentrate on the classicist Jane Harrison and the historian Eileen Power.Woolf is the most obvious motor for Square Haunting. The title tips its hat to ‘Street Haunting’, her essay about a London meander. Its premise – the difficulty and importance for women of securing what was then a ...”

“... J.F.C. Harrison has recently told us ‘about the people who are usually left out of history’ – such people as the maid-of-all-work in 1909 whose duties kept her busy from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m.* Christopher Hampton gives us, in an anonymous 15th-century poem, a lament over women’s perpetual drudgery. His extract from the early feminist Mary Astell, writing in 1721, acknowledges that by comparison with Eastern women, who ‘are born Slaves, and live Prisoners all their Lives’, Englishwomen have an easy servitude, but ‘Fetters of Gold are still Fetters ...”

“... and solicitous, but it was rare for anyone to challenge him, or even ask a question. When Bernie Harrison, from Leeds, one day offered a mildly dissenting view on something to do with Henry James, Leavis declared: ‘Well Harrison, if you think that, you must be totally insensitive to the whole of English ...”

“... of vengeance as Odysseus did not. These shifting valuations make timely the volume edited by S.J. Harrison. The papers assembled, 26 in number, range from an article by Bowra dated 1933-4 to a lecture published in 1987 by D.A. West. West and Nicholas Horsfall are each represented by three contributions, as is R.D. Williams. E.L. ...”

“... great Devil’s law of Theft by the Rich from the Poor’, and his view has moulded the outlook of Lawrence Goldman and all but one of his seven contributors to this book. Ruskin’s outlook helps to explain why there have been only two biographies of Fawcett, the second published in 1915. The decline in Fawcett’s reputation after his death in 1884 was ...”

“... The femme fatale Diana is foiled in her attempt to grab the hero – played by the youthful Rex Harrison while Diana was Kay Hammond – and decides to console herself with the young Lord Heybrook, who is about to arrive at the crammers’ establishment (a perfect and improbable Thirties scenario). She duly makes a languid appearance in her ...”

“... Poetry written in dialect seems to be undergoing a resurgence. Tony Harrison has made extensive use of Northern idioms. Tom Paulin has been busy raiding Ulster (and, I suspect, Scottish) dictionaries. Craig Raine has produced a manifesto, ‘Babylonish Dialects’, on dialect’s behalf. And several of the books under review here – by Scots, Welshmen and British West Indians – cannot be read without the glossaries which they thoughtfully provide ...”

“... of secularisation in early 19th-century England, marriage by a public registrar was instituted. Lawrence Stone describes this enactment of 1837 as setting up a two-track system of marriage in England, but with marriages performed by a registrar remaining remarkably unpopular, at least the first time around. Only in the 1970s did the proportion of civil ...”