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“... Harriet Guest’s starting-point is Donald Davie’s suggestion in 1958 that Christopher Smart might be considered ‘the greatest poet between Pope and Wordsworth’. Her intelligent and carefully argued book does not deliver quite the far-reaching reassessment of Smart’s status Davie must have had in mind. He wanted Smart to be judged over the whole range of his poetic output, both conventional and unconventional, ‘light and ribald as well as devotional, urbane or tender as well as sublime ...”

“... is then enlivened by the regular appearance of Wittgenstein on wheels. Philip Thody and Howard Evans, in their bonhomous Faux Amis and Key Words, are happy to have Wittgenstein say, just like that, that the meaning of a word is its use. But Wittgenstein did not think the matter that simple. Burchfield prefers the more ample and flexible thought of ...”

“... work for – publishing and journalism – into auxiliary volunteer militias. Between them, Harry Evans and Tina Brown raised whole regiments of foot, horse and guns; flooding the bookstores and news-stands with the reassuring visage of the hero of Panama and Vietnam. Not to say an unfeeling thing, but if there were already any symptoms of palsy in the ...”

“... on the many Germans who didn’t participate in atrocities against the Jews. He follows Christopher Browning’s account of the ‘ordinary men’ of Police Battalion 101, who became mass murderers after they were tasked with killing Jewish men, women and children behind the Eastern Front, in regarding obedience to authority under certain ...”

“... Heep-like acknowledgments, Morris warmly thanks Random House editors of the stature of Harold Evans and Jason Epstein. Never mind for the moment that Random House doesn’t employ a copy-editor who knows the use or meaning of the word ‘refute’. Here is a ‘book’ for which two and a half million dollars were paid up front, in a surreptitious ...”

“... behaviour often hovered dangerously close to being that of a paedophile,’ snorted Christopher Hart on the day Brian Gilbert’s movie Wilde was released). Julia Prewitt Brown sees him as a philosophical heavyweight; and celebrates his ‘dodginess’ in order to instal him in a post-dualist tradition of aesthetic theory – a missing link ...”

“... insights of Frege and (therefore) the analytical tradition. The work, for example, of Gareth Evans and Christopher Peacocke, which seeks, to some extent, to analyse what it is to think about an object independently of language, strikes Dummett as a dangerous form of apostasy, threatening to undo the good work of Frege ...”

“... off, and of strikes that did while failing to make any difference. (Though the cartoons of Phil Evans, who managed a combination of Dada and Social Realism and often illumined these ephemeral scuffles, seem to have been airbrushed.) The keyword, then as now, was ‘rank and file’. It took me a long time to tire of this term, with its faint suggestion of ...”

“... Myth is a collection of essays, mostly attacks on Orwell from the Left. The militants are Malcolm Evans, Alan Brown, Alaric Jacob, Bill Alexander, Robert Stradling, Beatrix Campbell, Deirdre Beddoe, Stephen Sedley, Lynette Hunter, Andy Croft, Stuart Hall, Antony Easthope and Christopher Norris. The attacks are now ...”

“... of the Empire and the Cold War, but they haven’t had their memoirs ghost-written by Harold Evans, their consultancy retained by ABC News and their columns syndicated across the qualities. They haven’t been met, at every airport lounge, with an orgy of sycophancy and a chorus of toadying, complicit mirth at every callous, mendacious jest (Kissinger, I ...”

“... assistants). The team is a strong one, including as it does Bonney on France, Elliott on Spain, Evans on Central Europe, Petersen on Denmark, Roberts on Sweden, and so on. These contributions, which amount to about 40 per cent of the whole, are signed, but they are fitted so neatly into the grand design that the result is a book and not just a collection of ...”

“... pregnant and in the kitchen – I had finally been allowed into heaven.’ Then, hey presto, Harry Evans shows up and offers her what must be her ideal job at his new magazine, Condé Nast Traveller. Throughout, Gully talks about people as if she barely knows them. If she can get away with describing someone as ‘clever and funny’ or ‘funny and ...”

“... 20th-century British Empire felt obliged to turn anthropologist and make space for large chunks of Evans-Pritchard on the Southern Sudan. This is not meant as negative criticism. If the rulers of ‘Britain’ in the 16th century had known all that Brigden knows, and shares with us, they might not have committed the atrocious acts which became literary ...”

“... became known as MI5 and MI6 had to be kept so secret; MI5 remained officially secret for 80 years. Christopher Andrew has another explanation, however. It was just a ‘taboo’, he writes (quoting the historian Michael Howard), like ‘intra-marital sex’. Everyone knew it went on, and was ‘quite content that it should, but to speak, write or ask questions ...”

“... developed shared conceptions of the transition to peace. These were symbolised above all in Christopher Addison’s Ministry of Reconstruction, with its ambitious portfolio of post-war reforms for industry and the social services. Whatever the political calculations, there was, then, a higher theme inherent in the General Election of 1918: it was called ...”