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“... and on the effect of that appropriation on how we write and think about the ancient world. The best-known version of this approach is Martin Bernal’s Black Athena, his sometimes brilliant, more often wilfully obtuse, exploration of the various forms of racism embedded within classics as a discipline. In Compromising Traditions (a collection of essays ...”

“... carries a hint of the deep feeling for the damaged and bewildered which marks the novelist’s best work, from The Aunt’s Story to the grand failure of The Twyborn Affair. From his surviving letters it is plain that White saw himself as one of his own ‘burnt ones’. From his early years he adopted, or perhaps inherited, a romantic and gnostic view of ...”

“... written better history, or at any rate better-written history, than the historians, among whom Geoffrey Blainey – whose The Tyranny of Distance must count as the single most original historical work about Australia – is exceptional in possessing an individual style. Manning Clark, doyen of Australian historians by virtue of his five-volume History of ...”

“... extraordinary angles of the TV cameras, wheeling above the congregation, ensured we all got the best seats in the house.Not that the abbey has ever been particularly democratic or, at least until the 19th century, respectable and dignified. It’s been part functioning church (four services a day, six on Sundays), part tourist attraction, since the 1590s ...”

“... case, since the historically pro-Shah and pro-colonial forces, as represented by politicians like Geoffrey Howe and George Bush and business spokesman like Lord Shawcross, have found themselves able to resist the allure of The Satanic Verses and even to anticipate with a writhe of embarrassment its effect on the tender parts of the Ayatollah. Anyway, when it ...”

“... Dying’ to alleviate the Christmas ordeal and his father was orphaned as a baby. Chance put Geoffrey Gorer’s pioneer study of Death, Grief and Mourning (1965), dust-jacketed in tasteful purple, into my hands for a review. An assiduous hymn-singer, I had long realised that centuries other than ours had different views on the subject, especially when I ...”

“... Deconstructionists (Jacques Derrida, Barbara Johnson, J. Hillis Miller) and one sympathiser (Geoffrey Hartman), two politically-minded oppositional critics (Edward Said, Frank Lentricchia) and two unclassifiable individualists (Harold Bloom, Frank Kermode). The ninth interviewee is the daddy of academic critics, the man with whom ‘we enter the critical ...”

“... or her spokesmen. The evidence on offer is sometimes thin. A not-proven verdict would seem the best he might hope for from an electorate which clearly did not care about the niceties of the sinking, or the Westland obfuscations, and which earlier this year returned the Premier for a third term. Even so, it is difficult not to applaud this stern, unyielding ...”

“... Bryan Rostron and I wrote to him asking about the Toronto rumour. Back came a firm reply from Geoffrey Grimes, a celebrated solicitor then acting for Archer: ‘Mr Archer was not involved in this incident.’ That seemed to be the end of the matter. Two years later, how were we to interpret this Simpson’s document? Jeffrey Archer, after all, was in ...”

“... particular ‘lesson in history’? Howard didn’t try to prove that Churchill was the miners’ best friend. Instead he summoned up the greater Churchill, who stood for national unity in the Second World War, against the lesser Churchill who was only too eager to put down strikes, and who – as depicted by Howard – was, of course, an indirect ...”

“... fierce criticism from Conservative politicians and journalists who clearly think it a subject best left in decent obscurity. In February, Marco Longhi, Tory MP for Dudley North, called for government funding to be withheld from such initiatives, run by people who ‘hate our history and seek to rewrite it’. The National Trust’s plans (as well as the ...”

“... a cigar, a piece of seaweed, a pickled gherkin) at the same time as it revealed the investigator, Geoffrey Braithwaite, to be a doctor with an unfaithful wife. An obsessive with an axe to grind, you might assume. But Braithwaite’s passion for Flaubert stemmed precisely from his own confusions; his loving research was not so much a way to make sense of his ...”

“... doleful about the poems’ retrieval of a happier past for slippered contemplation. In one of the best poems in the book, ‘1996’, it is the bad smell and its painful associations that stay in the memory rather than the peach tree image with which Dunn seeks to expunge them: The Expelair in the lavatory – Relentless thing – is a better orator Than I ...”

“... at Oxford. The only begetter of the study of literary theory at Oxford, he became the subject’s best-known teacher there, the leading authority in the field in Britain, and one of its most acclaimed proponents in the world beyond. Appropriately, the major function of literary theory on both sides of the Atlantic was to open a gate and sponsor an ...”

“... inner murk – his buried life.’ This chapter needs a far more interrogative context, such as Geoffrey Hartman provides in The Fateful Question of Culture (1997). Raine keeps such a context distant by concentrating on the English Eliot. We hear a lot of Arnold and Kipling, something of Browning and Clough, Shakespeare and Milton, less of Pater, but ...”