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“... a failure of nerve, bang followed by whimper: you can draw a direct line back from Hare’s George Jones to Jimmy Porter. And onwards to today. The third anti-revisionist argument is that – by putting the playwright back at the centre of the theatre – Osborne opened the door to wave upon wave of socially engaged new theatre writing, from 1957 all the way ...”

“... his inclination to paganism and underestimates the influence of his philosophy. A few pages of Edgar Wind’s Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance supply a corrective in both matters. After the Turkish conquest, the situation of the Greeks was, from Toynbee’s point of view, more satisfactory. External matters were efficiently handled by the Sultan, and ...”

“... on 16 famous writers, most of whom were in their prime during the directorship of J. Edgar Hoover. It was a Cold War habit in the days of domestic radicalism to collect such files, and the documents are at once fascinating and underwhelming. Most of the information so dutifully gathered would now be available through a call to the author’s ...”

“... her web. The mother’s name, for a start, is Lenore, and therefore, thanks to two famous poems by Edgar Allan Poe (the name features in ‘The Raven’ as well as ‘Lenore’ itself), steeped in death as a set of literary conventions, something that happens in books. The associations are all the stronger for not being commented on – there’s no weary ...”

“... can hardly be accounted a community when the keynote of the book is isolation. Spoon River in Edgar Lee Masters’s book of poems is a place of hypocrisy and double-dealing where only the dead can tell the truth from their graves. Part of the enduring appeal of It’s a Wonderful Life for cinema and television audiences can be put down to its sense of how ...”

“... mildly disorienting function: it makes no claim to alarm or thrill. There will be no entering into Edgar Allan Poe territory. It wouldn’t be fair to say that Phillips has painted herself into a corner by starting with a set of misleading signals – truer to say that she has rationed the amount of paint available to be used, after the first few lurid ...”

“... memories I was a nonstarter. I had not spent hours in the crook of a great tree devouring Alice or Edgar Rice Burroughs. I read (and even then patchily – I never devoured anything) Hotspur, Champion and Knock-Out, not quite the ore of art. It’s true that for a long time I too went to bed early, but most children did in those days, with no effect on the ...”

“... some Oedipal tension in the mucosal late 1970s air. Early in Elvis Has Left the Building Dylan Jones, the editor of GQ, brushes against some of the paradoxes of Elvis in the age of punk. But it never goes much further than that. We get nearly as much of the author’s own biography as Presley’s: small-town rock obsessive, punk convert, London ...”

“... a raven called Grip, in fact a series of birds bearing that name, and was on friendly terms with Edgar Allan Poe, who had admired the depiction of the raven in Barnaby Rudge (also called Grip) and was pleased to learn he had a real-life model. Poe knew (at least this is Guy Davenport’s contention in ‘The Geography of the Imagination’) that the raven ...”

“... recalls their association in the art of the Renaissance, powerfully depicted in the chapter of Edgar Wind’s Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance called ‘Amor as a God of Death’. Lovers in poetry will often wish for death or threaten suicide, and the poets sometimes delight in imagining their own funerals or those of their loved ones. Propertius dwells ...”

“... other factor in my favour is that, compared to most other guys, I have nothing to lose.He nurses a jones for the agency’s older, married female boss. When his moment finally comes – her bare legs stretched before him on the coffee table – she says: ‘Take me – or your Christmas bonus.’ It’s a hilarious Jack Benny ‘Your money or your ...”

“... back to the landscape of terns and gulls, to Pip’s encounter with Magwitch on the marshes. Tom Jones, on the other hand, gives its hero the least interpretable name you could imagine. This hero sounds not just ordinary but so ordinary he must eventually become as significant as his guardian, the over-aptly named Allworthy. Giving a character a completely ...”

“... who play ‘the mythical game of time’. An Occidental Haroun, he wears a broad-brimmed Indiana Jones hat. He’s a role player, a trans-dimensional tourist. Hence the language. ‘Pard’, according to Jonathon Green’s Dictionary of Slang, has no existence outside the fictionalised Wild West. Moorcock is like one of those local library researchers from ...”

“... on 8 January 1908: ‘When I am in front of a picture, it speaks better than I do.’ Edgar Degas, ‘Three Women at the Races’ (1885) It is a chastening remark, because most of us, when in front of a picture, do not give the picture time enough to speak. We talk at it, about it, of it, to it; we want to forcibly understand it, get its ...”

“... major slave-trading port. So is Heathcliff of African descent? Nelly consoles him over not having Edgar Linton’s blue eyes by claiming that a good heart will always help a person to a ‘bonny’ face even ‘if you were a regular black’. All we know for certain is that Brontë went out of her way to insist on Heathcliff’s racial and ethnic ...”