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“... is all there in the photographs: the ship’s cook Walrus Oakenbough playing a flute; cetologist Paul Spong on his bunk, consulting the I Ching, and so on. But it also showed pictures of the crew in motorised rubber dinghies playing chicken with the whale-chasers, quite literally saving whale lives by getting between the harpoon and the whale. Lamb’s book ...”

“... but no match for Leavis’s dismissive account of Shelley in Revaluation (1936). Herbert Read, G.Wilson Knight, Frederick Pottle and many other defenders argued that Shelley’s poetry is sustained by the coherence of its imagery, and that the work as a whole shows an extremely intelligent mind fully in touch with the philosophy and science available to ...”

“... a style is how easy it is to parody. Pevsner’s is more difficult than it looks. It defeats A.N. Wilson in Who Was Oswald Fish?, as Simon Bradley points out in a wide-ranging essay on ‘Pevsner in Fiction, Theatre and Cinema’. Imitation even of the most laconic entries is difficult. Only Alan Hollinghurst, among Bradley’s examples, gets it nearly ...”

“... glorifying the work of the Velvet Underground over Motown releases, the production skills of Brian Wilson over those of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and ...”

“... We are used to hard words from Belfast and the impingement (even in so wry and oblique a talent as Paul Muldoon) of uncomfortable sectarian truths. But McGuckian is like Denton Welch, whose war-diaries make no mention of the war: we can only just make out this century, let alone her own particular time and place. In a recent Muldoon poem which turns his fellow ...”

“... John Bull turns round to look at you, you are not well-dressed,’ he observed to Harriette Wilson, ‘but either too stiff, too tight, or too fashionable.’ Yet only a few years after the Beau’s creditors forced him into exile, the young dandies were wearing make-up, enormously high shirt collars, stiff lapels on their coats and corsets to produce ...”

“... denounce you as the Antichrist,’ he shouted, in the European Parliament, at Pope John Paul II. ‘Harlot’ was also a favourite, but this was rarely applied to an actual woman, being reserved for the Church of Rome. The same applied to ‘whore’, as in, ‘of Babylon’. The purity, in this uncracked patriarchy, of their own women, was a ...”

“... rewriting Don Quixote word for word, and his version turns out to be better than the original. Paul Auster, in the New York Trilogy, follows the logic of detection into dizzy madness. But these clevernesses aren’t just sparked by the idea: they are affected by detective fiction’s glamour. And much of this glamour comes from film, and most of that from ...”

“... a harsh reassessment. Carlyle had earlier translated the whimsical German Romantic novelist Jean Paul Richter, lyrical and discursive by turns, a major influence on Sartor Resartus, and Marx now noted and deplored the pervasive effect on Carlyle’s style of this ‘literary apothecary’. Anthony Trollope and Edward Fitzgerald thought Carlyle had finally ...”

“... His treatment of major political figures is untypically nuanced: both Harold Macmillan and Harold Wilson escape the caricature that popular history has handed down. He writes effectively about the ins and outs of economic policy, charting the complex conflicts between One Nation Toryism and incipient neoliberalism during the Macmillan administration, and ...”

“... handsome, as became clear in the arguments fifty years ago about how much grime to wash off St Paul’s. The contrast on a bright day between the dirty-grey south portico of St George’s, which was cleaned decades ago, and the stark black and white of the untouched south face of the tower suggests that the clear picture one now has of the portico’s ...”

“... full fellowship from the Pepsi Cola Company and did a postgraduate year at Cambridge on a Woodrow Wilson scholarship. Conscription was still in effect, and after his educational deferments ran out, Ellsberg had to decide how to fulfil his military service obligation. On his return from Britain, he applied for officer candidate school in the Marine Corps and ...”

“... of Eastern socialism, and so forth. And (of course) to grimy Western home-truths like Sir Harold Wilson and Santiago Carrillo. But all that lies far under the alto-cumulus of theory upon which these arguments proceed. Christine Buci-Gluckmann’s Gramsci and the State unfolds on the highest stratum of this theoretic realm. In spite of its vast range of ...”

“... doesn’t seem very long since I did the same for Roy Jenkins. At Bodley I’m overtaken by A.N. Wilson, who’s brought his gown in a Sainsbury’s bag, though it’s part of Roy Jenkins’s legacy that gowns are no longer required on such occasions. This doesn’t stop many of the voters swishing about in them for the benefit of their families, who are ...”