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“... generation never forgave him for this and, as with so many other ‘appeasers’, including R.A. Butler, the charge of supporting Hitler’s causes stuck to him until the end. When Stalin began to win battles, Carr changed his tune. His Times editorials argued strongly, and with influence, for recognition of the role that the Soviet Union would have after ...”

“... was not immune to the charm of historical inevitability, thought Kehama marvellous and (as Marilyn Butler has observed) several times borrowed from Thalaba the central device of a boat leading a protagonist inexorably downstream towards an appointed destiny. Newman outdid even Shelley in admiration, acclaiming Thalaba as ‘the most Sublime of English ...”

“... that exposes gender as a masquerade for all of us), verges on ‘critical perversity’. Judith Butler was the target, charged with celebrating as transgressive the hovering, unsettled condition, which, as Teleford, Jacques and Kaveney testify, places transsexual people at risk of violence. There is another distinction at work here, a division of labour ...”

“... round number pulled out of a hat. In the New York Times the PR spokesman identified himself as ‘John Barron’. In the Associated Press story the same publicity man called himself ‘Donald Baron’ and was quoted as saying that ‘the merit of these stones was not great enough to save them.’ Both ‘John’ and ...”

“... as a poet has been doubtful or negligible. This is a position firmly summarised in Marilyn Butler’s handbook, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (1981). She argues that the only Coleridge to pause over is the man whose ‘really significant or at least influential career was as a moulder of opinion’ – that is, as a political journalist. His ...”

“... than the Bog of Allen will ever care or know, that there was once a painter in Ireland called Jack Butler Yeats. Like McGreevy, Beckett was fascinated by Jack Yeats; in these letters Yeats the painter is almost alone among living Irish figures of the previous generation whom Beckett mentions with constant respect. In 1930, McGreevy wrote of Beckett to Jack ...”

“... escapades or of other people’s bad behaviour, a favourite being how, after a performance in John Osborne’s A Patriot for Me at Chichester for which he had been much praised, Alan was sitting in his dressing-room when there was a tentative knock on the door. It was Alec Guinness. He shook Alan’s hand, said, ‘You must be very tired,’ and ...”

“... a body modification technology,’ as Lewis puts it, in the footsteps of Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler: the home, the wedding ring, even the binary sexuation, are only there by convention, honoured – or not – by time. ‘Natural’ childbirth, with pools and music and aromatic midwives, is ‘a regimen full of carefully stylised gestational labour hacks ...”

“... of her first novel behind her, Bedford got a contract to write an entire book about the trial of John Bodkin Adams – the Harold Shipman of his time – at the Old Bailey that year. The book begins with the judge’s entrance, ‘trailing a wake of subtlety, of secret powers, age’ and ends three and a half weeks later with the not guilty verdict. In ...”

“... Slater and Maya Slater, prompts us to ask again: ‘What is Tourguéneffish?’ Edmund Wilson, John Bayley and others have made the point that Turgenev in the original is more ‘textured’, modulated and idiomatic (‘He is interested in words,’ Wilson wrote, ‘in a way that the other great 19th-century Russian novelists – with the exception of ...”

“... the impulse to take charge. She allowed herself to be persuaded by her cabinet secretary, Robin Butler, that it was too dangerous for the prime minister’s office to appear to be setting the terms of the dispute. She remained reliant on her energy secretary, Peter Walker, whom she didn’t trust and feared would do ‘a fudge, like Pym and the Foreign ...”

“... start of the operation to ask what they thought its legacy would be. Not one – not Labour’s John Reid, now Baron Reid of Cardowan, or Des Browne, now Baron Browne of Ladyton, or John Hutton, now Baron Hutton of Furness, or Bob Ainsworth, or the Conservatives’ Philip Hammond or Liam Fox – was prepared to ...”

“... won admirers among the black writers who emerged during the Black Power era, such as LeRoi Jones, John A. Williams and Ishmael Reed. And his legacy now? As Jackson writes, ‘history has borne out some of his vinegary judgments.’ Today, Himes’s belief in the implacable force of white supremacism – what is now called Afro-pessimism – enjoys a growing ...”

“... the painter of bathing boys. Three or four are mere suspects, followed by question marks: Samuel Butler? Luca Signorelli? Forster had presumably seen those great paeans to the male buttocks, Signorelli’s frescoes in Orvieto cathedral, and come to an irresistible conclusion. A felt kinship with Whitman was fairly predictable for a gay writer at the time; in ...”

“... Oxford who caused him concern’: he believed him to be his illegitimate brother. Her grandfather John Horatio Lloyd had, in the 1830s, ‘exposed himself in the Temple Gardens’ and run ‘naked in the sight of some nursemaids’, thus losing the opportunity to become solicitor-general. He ‘was forced to retire from political and legal work for four ...”