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“... a further implication: that the ‘nuances of English life’ are, at bottom, always the same. Philip Mason, in his The English Gentleman, jumps in more boldly: ‘There, in the second half of the 14th century, are Chaucer’s men and women, far more like people in Britain in the second half of the 20th century than one has any right to expect ... the ...”

“... The Ghost Writer is Philip Roth’s best novel yet. Certainly it is his most ingenious. But this familiar way of putting things may contain a mistake, a mistake which is part of the subject-matter of Roth’s book. ‘Best novel yet’ implies a future of prosperous activity which may be barmecidal. The novelist-hero of Henry James’s story ‘The Middle Years’ is amused by the view that his latest novel is ‘the best thing he has done yet’: it ‘made such a grand avenue of the future ...”

“... on Native Americans by Daniel Richter, and another on the ‘black experience’ of Empire by Philip Morgan. But broadly speaking, the radical historians of Empire – David Killingray, Peter Sluglett, Nicholas Tarling – have been confined to the final, historiographical volume, while the more conservative have been given the meaty chapters in the bulk ...”

“... Both​ Paul Mason’s PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future and Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work advocate things that seemed to have disappeared from thinking on the left sometime in the late 1960s: technological optimism, futurism, the making of programmes and the issuing of demands as opposed to bearing witness through protest ...”

“... of my local bookshop. It’s been painted on the glass by hand. It’s from the first sentence of Mason & Dixon.Thomas Pynchon was born on Long Island, New York in 1937. He studied engineering, physics and, later, English literature, at Cornell University, then worked as a technical writer for Boeing until 1962. Not long after that, he more or less ...”

“... oaths, handshakes and symbolic imagery pique the curiosity of the uninitiated, or ‘cowans’ in Mason-speak. Yet, despite its exotic paraphernalia, the Craft’s wider influence on British society is perceived to be mundane and narrow in compass. The list of allegations on the dust-jacket of Short’s book runs to corruption in local government, perversions ...”

“... that’s been exploited, in America, at one level by comedians like Lenny Bruce and Jackie Mason, and at quite another level, by Jewish novelists. American fiction’s most single-minded portrait of the goy is in The Assistant by Bernard Malamud. The goy is Frank Alpine, the down-and-out thief who robs the failing grocery store of the Jew, Bober, later ...”

“... happening at once, nobody has time to take much notice – this was all said in the 36 lines of Philip Larkin’s ‘Vers de Société’. While nobody would deny that Coover and his contemporaries opened our horizons twenty years ago, I would see Gerald’s Party as the work of a writer imprisoned in his own success. If this were to be the last of the ...”

“... of his book. It was, according to Szreter, a ‘culture of abstinence’, influential right up to Philip Larkin’s 1963 (when ‘sexual intercourse began’), which mainly drove down the fertility of England and Wales – but probably not that of other Western countries experiencing a comparable decline. On this account, diffusionism is out of the window. No ...”

“... from London society, managing to seem both unformed and overly formal; the Confederate envoy James Mason says ‘chaw’ for ‘chew’, calls himself ‘Jeems’ and offends British officials with his crude racist remarks; the Southern spy Belle Boyd charms influential men with her deft flirtations. Meanwhile a motley British crowd jostles for involvement in ...”

“... eventually, but for a while I was in hot water. It began with my discovery of the diary of Jimmy Mason, known as the Hermit of Great Canfield, in the loft of my parents’ house. I was 16 at the time, and any schoolboy would have been thrilled to read these opening words: ‘If I should be poisoned at last, and this book is found, it will explain ...”

“... Philip Marsden​ ’s new book explores an idea as much as it explores a country. It journeys westward through Cornwall from Bodmin Moor to Scilly, alighting on the rocky eminences where granite has boiled up through the Earth’s crust and crystallised into highlands and headlands. It’s rugged country, raked by south-westerlies ‘bred of the Atlantic’ and eaten at by seas surging into the throat of the Channel ...”

“... masonic lodge, displeased that The Magic Flute played fast and loose with masonic symbolism: any mason would apparently hear the three fortissimo chords that open the overture as a subliminal reference to their ceremony of initiation, which is heralded by three knocks on the temple door. The one slice of mythology about which everyone is sure – that Mozart ...”

“... Jesuits,’ does not take us very far towards understanding either the Escorial or the court of Philip II. An alternative model of the relationship between the history of architecture and the rest of cultural history was offered by the late Rudolf Wittkower in his Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (1949). Wittkower had two aims. The first was ...”

“... was quite keen on me.’ What on earth were they looking for – Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney and Charles Causley – that they should have rated Bosley’s heart-warming dexterity (feelingful as well as formal) below, for instance, 18 solid unpunctuated pages of pornographic daydream: Kenneth Bernard’s ‘The Baboon in the ...”