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“... and Lawrence Urdang move from one dictionary house to another. Oxford (with R.W. Burchfield and John Sykes) is comparatively stable. When work began on the new Collins, Paul Procter and Della Summers were young conductors under impresario Urdang, and they later moved on to make dictionaries for Longman. Patrick Hanks was recruited to complete the Collins ...”

“... political life’. The writers Inglis presents under this rubric are William Morris, T.H. Green, John Maynard Keynes, R.G. Collingwood, F.R. Leavis, George Orwell, Adrian Stokes, Tony Crosland – as he calls him – Richard Titmuss, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, ...”

“... and Myres, and Stenton) and Taylor’s. I doubt if the new one will fare any better. John Roberts, the general editor, does not show his hand in detail, and we must keep our fingers crossed about the whole being greater than the parts by giving ‘an account of the development of our country in time’ – ‘our country’ meaning something ...”

“... amor vincit omnia Venus lies ahead – ball of mists and disenchanted fruitfulness, too hot for charity, too steamy for reproach, my mission crystalline as snow: to conquer what has always conquered us. Airlock doors slide open. They reveal the Mekon, president of Love Unexpurgated, a peagreen Humpty Dumpty on a flying plate, vestigial legs suggesting toxic misadventures at the antenatal stage, the sonic scalpel of his voice sharp inside my brain: Welcome to the planet humans dream of on their cold blue ball ...”

“... A little over thirty years ago, John Ashbery delivered a lecture at the Yale Art School called ‘The Invisible Avant-Garde’, in which he asked whether the distinction between the avant-garde and the mainstream has become obsolete. ‘Looking back only as far as the beginning of this century,’ he remarked, ‘we see that the period of neglect for an avant-garde artist has shrunk for each generation ...”

“... including first-rate 18th-century portraits by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Devis, John Opie, Jonathan Richardson and Richard Cosway, among others. The small, unattributed canvas he disposes of in 1928 is not in the same league. But it does come with an intriguing back story. Most of Henry Howard’s family’s wealth originally came from sugar ...”

“... intrinsically oppressive) and the latter positively (as intrinsically ‘liberating’). Raymond Williams has made a more persistent attempt to grasp the nature of this relation than any living British writer and has certainly avoided sentimentalising imagination, even if his conception of power has proved rather more equivocal. In the present volume he is ...”

“... anti-ministerial ‘Advice to a Painter’ satires were absurdly attributed to the royalist poet John Denham); and in the case of published books, the printer’s name and location could be disguised by the use of a false imprint.For Thomas Keymer in his beautifully detailed history, such strategies of evasion are one of the things that make seditious ...”

“... I sometimes​ argue with my friend Heathcote Williams about his use of pornography as a means of attacking his political enemies. It seems to me an irrelevant weapon in any context, and in the hands of a man with Heathcote’s anarchistic, optimistic, nearly utopian convictions it becomes puzzlingly inconsistent ...”

“... in a more seedily charming and futile way than in The British Museum is falling down. Nigel Williams’s Witchcraft opens with a scene in the British Library (as it now is) which neatly defines what the great British institution stands for in the late 1980s: namely, the enemy, a redoubt for Thatcher’s bureaucrat henchmen. Jamie Matheson, youngish TV ...”

“... peglegs: all press-ganged upstream with Adam Dalgleish’s impersonator, Roy Marsden, for the Long John Silver show at the Mermaid. James is left with a heritage trail of selective quotations, a London Dungeon of waxwork crimes exhibited in authentic locations. This is an empty set, a set defined by its architecture (where even Mandy the Temp, in her ...”

“... since in traditional comic theatre the Dame was a transvestite role. And now Carolyn Williams, a feminist critic, has published a searching analysis of the thinking behind Gilbert’s libretti, and delivered a verdict of ‘not guilty’ on the charge of misogyny. Her book is, in its way, as unexpected and remarkable as Strachey’s compliment of ...”

“... God, not another fucking elf!’ the English lecturer and long-time Inkling Hugo Dyson cried. John Wain, an attendee at meetings in the late 1940s, described his heart sinking as Tolkien appeared at Lewis’s door with a bulging jacket pocket, yet again. Tolkien looked down on Lewis’s Narnia, which he thought had been created with insufficient ...”

“... of the work of a British artist. It is also one of the dullest. Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams have resisted the tendency of the last fifteen years or so by which the catalogues of major exhibitions have often been presented as major interpretative studies of the artist and his times. Constable is a catalogue, nothing more. It maximises our ...”

“... To spend time​ with Tennessee Williams – for months on end in the case of Elia Kazan, the director who put his plays on the stage in the 1940s and 1950s; 12 years in the case of his latest and best biographer, John Lahr; or even as little as six weeks by me while reading Lahr’s absorbing Life, along with the work, and a big chunk of all the stuff Williams wrote and said about the work – is to learn and relearn how soberly Williams was speaking when he told Kazan: ‘I don’t know what it is to take anything calmly ...”