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“... With his trusty snorkel, he stakes out the whole of watery England for his Grail quest. Like D.H. Lawrence, Deakin is happy, in the end, to remain mystified by the secret of that invigorating power. He quotes Lawrence’s poem ‘The Third Thing’: Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a third ...”

“... in McTaggart or Bradley. He broke loose from Hegelianism with the help first of William James and then of Russell, Moore and Alexander. But unlike Russell, Anderson did not emerge from his Hegelianism determined to deny whatever Hegel had asserted and to assert whatever Hegel had denied. He continued to respect Hegel – who was himself an ...”

“... hybrid in culture. It is no accident that he started on a postgraduate thesis at Oxford on Henry James, hardly the most congenial of topics for an English literary leftist, but with an obvious appeal for a student of intercultural relations. His suspicion of fully-fledged systems is also, ironically enough, characteristically English. The most obviously ...”

“... the house behind them, a miserable hut of miscellaneous logs and tarpaper. But the art historian James Curtis has shown that the reality was much less desperate. There was no dust storm: Rothstein couldn’t have shot the picture if there had been, and besides, the horizon is clearly visible. The building was a disused shack, not the family house, which can ...”

“... Human Abstract’. The Vassar archives hold references to many other writers and critics – Henry James, Hart Crane, as well as notes on modern art and scattered thoughts on narrative – that don’t make it into Quinn’s edition, and it would have been good to know more about her selection criteria. Small quarrels aside, Quinn’s notes constitute a ...”

“... good casting. Willeford is adored by his peers and big-deal crime writers like Donald Westlake and Lawrence Block praise his work. ‘Nobody,’ Elmore Leonard said, ‘writes a better crime novel than Charles Willeford.’ Quentin Tarantino cited Willeford as one of the major influences on Pulp Fiction. There can be something a little suspect about being so ...”

“... curiosity whose work has not worn well. ‘I think one ought to be downright cruel to him,’ D.H. Lawrence said, and many have been. Max Beerbohm was, when at a dinner party he asked Davies, ‘How long is it since Shaw discovered you?’; on being told it was 13 or 14 years, he replied, ‘Oh dear dear – and has it been going on all this time?’ and added ...”

“... as professor of creative writing at Glasgow University, a position shared with Tom Leonard and James Kelman; and nice gigs as a celebrity designer of murals at Hillhead subway station and at the Oran Mór arts centre. In terms of politics, however, Gray and the new Glasgow are at loggerheads. In 1990 he lampooned the European City of Culture festivities in ...”

“... young artists, architects and critics (including Richard Hamilton, Peter and Alison Smithson, and Lawrence Alloway, among others) who developed, from within the Modernist Institute of Contemporary Art, a Pop sensibility of their own. His revised dissertation, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, made his scholarly reputation in 1960; thereafter Banham ...”

“... Tailor – ‘a device so simple that it left him genuinely elated by its symmetry’. Clive James, writing in 1977, had similar feelings about the ‘symmetrical economy’ of The Spy who Came in from the Cold (1963). ‘It could,’ he said, ‘be turned into an opera.’ Le Carré – that is, David Cornwell, an ex-spy – once said that he entered ...”

“... lecturing tone’, which, he said, was ‘not so attractive’, while MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell gave her public instructions on how to use a microphone, Bob Woodward bitched that she was ‘screaming’ and Bob Cusack, the editor of the political newspaper the Hill, said: ‘When Hillary Clinton raises her voice, she loses.’ One could ...”

“... on literature produced by functionaries of the British Empire – Mungo Park on Central Africa, James Cook and Joseph Banks on the Pacific Islands, William Jones on India – and shared their assumptions about civilisational development. Progress was measured by the extent to which a society exploited its land efficiently, and by the relative predominance ...”

“... waiting for me on a trolley. The earliest documents are from 1939. In July, the Broadway manager James Ross received a letter about the Landlord and Tenant War Damage Act, which laid out the rights of those whose premises were hit by enemy action. Soon, the projectionists left to fight, returning to their positions when the war ended.In August 1947 there was ...”

“... Report of 1955 is cited for its ‘chilling’ prose. President Eisenhower had commissioned James Doolittle to evaluate CIA operations. His Report, as the Church Commission notes, can be read as a brief for future CIA operations. It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at ...”

“... Romantics at the far end, going through some aspects of Arnold and Ruskin, to Pater, Yeats and Lawrence, Graves, elements of Eliot and Woolf, and down to Leavis, Dylan Thomas and then, coming towards the nearer end of the line, the dark, odd and uncouth figure of Ted Hughes. In the superb doorstop of his Collected Poems, Hughes comes across as a more ...”