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“... and vogueishness – have been dealt with explicitly by other writers: Douglas Dunn, Tony Harrison, Linton Kwesi Johnson, John Agard, Grace Nichols and Tom Leonard, to name a few. For some, ‘literary art’ is a territory to be attained (Harrison’s ‘we’ll occupy/ your lousy leasehold, poetry’), in others a ...”

“... or Judges in Execution of their Duty’. Allen Boyer (an American attorney and historian) and Mark Nicholls (a Cambridge academic) have what at first appears a straightforward project: to trace the path followed by English law for more than a millennium in categorising, criminalising and penalising treasonable acts. They conclude that treason as a crime ...”

“... last, with its perception of the links between political and cultural power, reminding one of Tony Harrison. There is something, too, of Harrison’s angle on the familiar in Dunn’s arresting four-line poem, ‘Glasgow Schoolboys, Running Backwards’. The ‘Ballad of the Two Left Hands’, on the unemployed, and a fine ...”

“... than the making of newspapers as consumer products. It is a chapter which will make more of a mark now in London clubs than in Wapping. It begins with a good quotation from a letter to T.H.S. Escott: ‘At this dinner it was agreed that you were the Amphitryon as well as the Demosthenes and Tacitus of the day, and a special banquet at which you ...”

“... to ‘W. Shakespeare’ or ‘M. Drayton’. At around the same time, what we call a ‘quotation mark’ (”), the descendant of the diplē (>), which had been used to mark notable passages in manuscripts, began to be used to mark sententiae, or memorable phrases, in vernacular ...”

“... the next few years in various other essays and reviews, the best of which are brought together in Mark Blacklock’s new edition of the journalism. Ballard’s view was that science fiction should get over its ‘juvenile’ fixation on outer space and concentrate instead on ‘inner space’ – an imaginative zone where ‘the inner world of the mind and ...”

“... the form of poetry natural to the reflective mind.’ Even so consistent a writer as Mark Strand suffers from this bent. Half his pages are lavished on ‘Elegy for My Father’, a text so ‘responsibly’ self-observant as to wince into narcissism. Strand is at his best in surreal lyrics about sex and murder in suburbia. But Vendler prefers his ...”

“... policy of denying Thérèse pain relief was elevated into suffering gladly embraced. Kathryn Harrison’s short life of Thérèse complements Monica Furlong’s 1987 study, and is in many ways more sympathetic. Neither biographer found the saint easy to like. Despite her sobriquet of the ‘Little Flower’, Thérèse was tough when her saintly interests ...”

“... to him in the night on the bed and sucked him.’ She even searched his body for the devil’s mark when he was asleep. Convinced that her husband had murdered their son Samuel by witchcraft, in order to make her work longer hours, she had no inhibition about publicising her fears. Parsons did nothing to allay the mounting suspicion. Reluctant to settle a ...”

“... that ‘this is the sort of thing we were sent to Europe to end.’ In a report to Truman, Earl G. Harrison, dean of the law school of the University of Pennsylvania, complained that the US forces in Germany were treating the Jews as the Nazis had, except that they weren’t exterminating them. Three months after the war, many Jewish DPs were still in ...”

“... begins with an abortive call from a public booth so hot that the caller’s hand leaves a mark on the receiver ‘as though he were covered in mutton grease’. Few things give greater pause for thought to the amnesiac ex-commando in John Lodwick’s ambitiously daft Peal of Ordnance (1947) than the state of the box from which he rings the BBC to tell ...”

“... from establishment figures in the music industry (musicians like Roger Daltrey and George Harrison, executives like BPI bigwig Maurice Oberstein). The revolution is all the more threatening to rock culture because music-makers operating in black and club music (notably hip-hop and house) have plugged into the new technology with enthusiasm, whereas ...”

“... Ward. Early in 1889, hearing that ‘that scoundrel Salisbury’ (as the positivist Frederic Harrison called him) was weighing the advantages of enfranchising a small slice of propertied (and presumably Conservative) women, Ward teamed up with her old friend Louise Creighton to respond. Their ‘Appeal against Women’s Suffrage’, which appeared over ...”

“... the Whig-Tory conflict as being largely between two rival mythologies of the Civil War. Even Brian Harrison, writing on Drink and the Victorians, is moved to remark that for many Dissenters in the Temperance Movement, the Civil War was very much a live issue, and there is surely a 17th-century legacy in Gladstone’s fear, in 1832, that the First Reform Bill ...”

“... on Anne’s death is unintentionally comical. ‘Sorry to hear your bad news!’ The exclamation mark is hilariously inappropriate though it’s quite hard to pinpoint why. 20 February. It’s years since I was on Desert Island Discs but these days I’d find it much easier to choose the eight records I don’t want than those that I do. I don’t ever want ...”