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“... Proust among other authors, from Dante to Emily Dickinson, and from Erasmus to Kierkegaard and Cole Porter, and it situates reading among a set of other activities, like listening to jazz or Mahler or looking at Rothko. How many other high-powered critical works, I wonder, have Buñuel next to Sir Thomas Browne in the index, or Stan Getz, next to ...”

“... Why is Tony Crosland one of the few Old Labour heroes that nobody mocks? Keir Hardie, G.D.H. Cole, Stafford Cripps, Gaitskell, even Nye Bevan, have become the subject of New Labour locker-room ribaldry. Yet to describe yourself as a ‘Crosland socialist’ still carries meaning. Maybe it is because of that sardonic smile, and an uneasy feeling that, if he were alive today, he would be doing the mocking ...”

“... to Holinshed and on to Spenser, Shakespeare and Dryden. It gave us Cymbeline, Lear and Old King Cole, as well as Merlin. But has there ever been a definitive text? It survives with four different dedications, to three different people, singly or paired, and sorting that out is only the start of an immense process of comparison and collation, manageable (as ...”

“... intelligence required to make proper use of that knowledge’. Nice work if you can do it, as Cole Porter didn’t quite say. Kermode is not Housman and not a diviner. But he does devote much exquisite intelligence to matters of divination – even and especially of secular affairs. He would like to believe we could do without such obliquities. He is ...”

“... without the other. Those who have both will find that, among contemporaries, Christopher Reid and Michael Hofmann are classified as love poets but Craig Raine and Tony Harrison as blue versifiers. Only a few poets make both, including Seamus Heaney, who has two poems unworthy of him in the Whitworth (one about unfreezing a vaginal pump, one about a ...”

“... marked between academics and curators who worked on premodern periods – the Renaissance expert Michael Baxandall, for example, was greatly respected in both worlds – and some curators of 20th-century art are much admired in the academy (the Museum of Modern Art in New York has had a string of such figures, from William Rubin to John Elderfield to Leah ...”

“... just how far men and women responded to these promptings and why. This is the main drawback in Michael Dobson’s clever, lucid and scrupulously-researched book about the making of Shakespeare’s national reputation. Part of the current fashion for problematising the literary canon, it argues that there were three main reasons for the rise of Bardolatry ...”

“... into the late 1930s, by which time Attlee was Labour leader. The Oxford intellectual G.D.H. Cole irritated him as a ‘permanent undergraduate’, who had ‘a new idea every year, irrespective of whether the ordinary man was interested in it or not’. Similarly, Cole’s Oxford colleague A.L. Rowse – then on the ...”

“... Qasim Saeed Mohammed, who was allegedly wanted in connection with the bombing of the US destroyer Cole in Aden the previous year. The handover occurred early on the morning of 23 October in a remote area of Karachi airport, where airport staff nonetheless observed and reported to Anwar that the captive was hustled aboard a white, twin-engined, turboprop ...”

“... John Dowland and Thomas Campion.’ (She might have looked sideways to Noël Coward, Bob Dylan or Cole Porter; to John Cage’s poetry, Ezra Pound’s operas, the compositions of Christopher Fry or Anthony Burgess.) One of the aims of her study is to rescue Gurney’s later work from accusations of madness, and offer it as evidence of his experimental, even ...”

“... warned. Exeter in May 1942 But as the Labour Party intellectuals Raymond Postgate and G.D.H. Cole complained in 1946, it was already clear that compulsory purchase ‘would be strenuously resisted by vested interests’. Ambitious plans for postwar Plymouth, sweeping away the confused street layout and replacing it with tidy geometric patterns, ran into ...”

“... Meriel McCooey, both aficionados of Hollywood musicals, could be heard breaking into duets of Cole Porter or Noël Coward – Meriel in tune, Francis undoubtedly faultless with the lyrics. At six o’clock a half-bottle of Teachers would be purchased for ‘pre-drink drinks’ – a deadline gradually pulled forward to 5.30. You would hear, at ...”

“... of Violence at the Roundhouse. His sobering report had Allen Ginsberg and R.D. Laing, Trocchi, Michael X, and other disparate luminaries of the International Times devouring every word. We wanted to hear the worst, the spidery voice of doom: the prophetic voice of the Ancient of Days, Blake’s voice hallucinated in Harlem. We wanted to leaf through the ...”

“... with Oliver Cromwell, and his denunciation by Judge Jeffreys: Oy! Oy! What ailed the old stock-cole, unthankful villain that he could not conform? Richard, Richard, dost thou think we’ll hear thee poison the court? Richard, thou art an old fellow, an old knave; thou has written books enough to load a cart, every one as full of sedition, I might say ...”

“... Cyber and television jihad are parts of the war that the former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer believes bin Laden is winning. Scheuer, whose Cassandra-isms as head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit went unheeded by the Clinton and Bush administrations before 2001, is still trying to warn America. ‘No one,’ he writes, ‘should be surprised ...”