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“... by Continental experts in the latest techniques in warfare. The army and its cannon made short work of a number of English border castles and towers. In Northumberland, James awaited the English army, led by Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey. Though apparently possessing advantages in ground, equipment and supplies, James allowed himself to be ...”

“... an influential period figure and cautionary example whose mystique emanated primarily from the short story ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’, a smattering of critical essays and poems, a quiver of mordant wisecracks, and the sad promise of what might have been. Bellow was bigger game. With Bellow, Atlas was climbing up to the high diving ...”

“... have seen it coming? The advance, I mean to say, of a mediocre but ruthless man without qualities? Philip Ziegler’s book charts the boy Wilson’s ghastly youth, replete with team spirit, sycophancy, Scout’s honour and a craving to please elders and authority. There it all is, if you can stomach the reading of it. (It used to be expressed in another ...”

“... at that moment of surrender.’ His idol was Billie Holiday, who gives the name to one of his best short poems. The speaker is looking for his girl, who has been taken away by a figure ‘as a god’. It ends:If you find anyoneanswering their descriptionplease let me know. I need themto carry the weight of my lifeThe old gods are gone. What lives onin my ...”

“... Ekkehard Jost observed, he would deliberately leave his melodic lines open, ‘stopping just short of the goal for which he is heading, and placing a dash’. His sound changed over the years: brash, buoyant and somewhat waxy on his first recordings, when he was a young man determined to make himself heard, it grew into something more languorous and ...”

“... may not have now come to an end, wrecked or perhaps just beached on the shores of the Postmodern. Philip Fisher’s new book, however, makes a daring case for the continued relevance of pre-Christian ideas about the passions. His argument is that we underestimate the positive potential of the ‘vehement passions’, long understood only as forces that must ...”

“... not need to be told that the great scholar had told his interlocutor to kiss his arse. Latin, in short, played vital roles in the first modern age. From Prague to Peru, it served as the arena of literary artistry, the vehicle of scientific communication and the medium of common-room gossip. Individuals across Europe and beyond knew Latin as intimately, loved ...”

“... book. So if you’re an academic wanting to write a book about Psycho, you really need an angle. Philip Skerry has come up with 60 angles: the 49 shots that make up the ‘shower scene’ proper, from Marion’s feet stepping into the bathtub to the moment when Norman is heard shouting ‘Mother! Oh God! Mother! Blood! Blood!’ back at the house, which ...”

“... deeply immersed in the image of man as trivia,’ Alfred Chester wrote when panning Updike’s short story collection Pigeon Feathers. ‘Reading Updike, like reading the New Yorker, gives one the impression that the pages would turn to ash at the mere suggestion that life was other than a negative-positive mosquito buzzing in the ear of a total ...”

“... When Empire of the Sun was published in 1984, ‘sympathetic readers of my earlier novels and short stories were quick to spot echoes … the drained swimming pools, abandoned hotels and nightclubs, deserted runways and flooded rivers.’ After the war, Ballard took a boat to Southampton with his mother and younger sister. In 1947, Edna and Margaret ...”

“... House of Saud, expected the Saudis to maintain sufficient unused capacity to compensate for any short-term market tightening or price volatility. It was Saudi Arabia that released oil to stall the OPEC price rises in 1973 and during the 1990-91 Gulf War. Within 24 hours of September 11, nine million extra barrels of Saudi oil were released to keep prices ...”

“... Imperatives are particularly frequent in refrains and closure devices, from which envoys are but a short digression away. Hollander’s preoccupation with the ‘reflexive troping’ of such self-referring devices is noticeable, and prompts the reflection that Melodious Guile may in some sense have turned out a poetics specifically of Post-Modernist ...”

“... out on the journey across the Atlantic – architecture, for one, since there is a picture of Philip Johnson, unmatched with any reference in the text – though this can hardly account for the absence of more than a passing reference to film-making and marketing, the prefabrication of the best-seller in publishing or the promoting of the politician. Some ...”

“... return to the ‘little’ author I was in Suffolk for almost ten years while working on Monty? Philip Ziegler and others have written kindly about the final Monty volume, hoping that I will not abandon writing. I won’t: I have finished the manuscripts of two short novels since finishing the first draft of Monty last ...”

“... but to Los Angeles, where he is reincarnated as Raymond Chandler’s fast-talking private eye, philip Marlowe, apparently in search of his father. ‘Immram’ is not easy to follow, but then neither is Chandler, who once admitted that he, the author, could not himself make out exactly what was happening in The Big Sleep. His other masterpiece, The Long ...”