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“... as a Kumbaya invitation to join hands for a moral-historical promenade. In reality, as Stephen Ellis was able to show in 2011, Mandela joined the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party in 1960 to help impose the SACP’s strategic choice of armed struggle on a reluctant ANC leadership. Mandela was the first leader of the ANC’s ...”

“... of his landlord: ‘bread-and-butter which had often been cut overnight and always had thumb-marks on it. However tactfully I tried, I could never induce Mr Brooker to let me cut my own bread-and-butter; he would hand it to me slice by slice, each slice gripped firmly under that broad black thumb.’ It may have been something to do with this, but I ...”

“... argument. I need now to list the main details throughout the book which prepare the reader for Stephen to accept the Bloom Offer. There is at once a rather quaint obstacle. Most readers of Ulysses do not believe in omens, but Joyce eagerly did; in this he is genuinely like Homer. Four of the characters receive omens, and Joyce would regard these as an ...”

“... heavy overcoat)’, ‘smasher (late Victorian hat)’ and ‘directoires (long knickers)’. Marks & Spencer, despite their profits (see page 4), could maybe do with reviving some of these. Who knows, they could even weave them from triffid. The bird on the cover of Stephen Green-Armytage’s Extraordinary Chickens ...”

“... Brockett in The Well of Loneliness bears an unmistakable resemblance to Coward. Hall’s heroine Stephen Gordon (Radclyffe Hall was called John for most of her adult life) knows that Brockett, a playwright with soft white hands and an effeminate voice, is a man ‘who would never require more of her than she could give’. When they visit Versailles together ...”

“... problem is not so much to explain the rise of the so-called ‘New Historicism’ associated with Stephen Greenblatt and his friends and followers, as to account for the hostile reactions to it. Why should it be considered subversive to replace literary texts in their historical contexts? Is the movement dangerous because it is historicist or because it is ...”

“... set upon, tortured and speared to death, as would have been the case not so long ago, surely marks a sea-change in human sensibility. On the contrary, if anyone had harassed the creature, well, they’d have been the one flensed. I happened to be passing through Oban en route to Mull so I joined the small group assembled behind the pizza parlour and ...”

“... can restore her lost treasures of chaste and delicate thoughts.’ Mr Fried’s other essay, ‘Stephen Crane’s Upturned Faces’, offers no respite from such ‘ravishing atrocities’. While bypassing (though not dismissing) psychoanalytic analysis of the works of the author of The Red Badge of Courage, Fried focuses on some motifs in that work, but ...”

“... year – she memorably called ‘The Middle Ground’. The novel of that title – her ninth – marks a reflective moment in Drabble’s evolution. Between The Middle Ground and her next work of fiction there was a seven-year pause (partly taken up with her immersion in the revised Oxford Companion to English Literature). The Radiant Way (1987) inaugurated ...”

“... rarely calls to talk about my research. In April, however, she rang to ask: ‘Do you agree with Stephen Hawking?’ That’s usually an easy question to field. On topics ranging from the behaviour of black holes to the structure of the early universe, a safe answer is yes. But that wasn’t what my mother wanted to know. She wanted to know whether I agreed ...”

“... and even managed to gain the disapproval of his old primary school teacher who, according to Stephen Gilbert, admired his final interview but was not pleased when ‘he said “God the old bugger” ... I didn’t like that.’ It was such a successful finale that I still expect the credits to roll and Potter to pop up again to instruct us not to assume ...”

“... what is so commonly referred to as his “place”,’ said one of his teachers, whose quotation-marks neatly distance him from the regrettable convention even as he reinforces it. But what would Robeson do with all this ability? Again, there are two ways of telling the story. One is that he wanted to practise law, enrolling in the Columbia University Law ...”

“... more of whom moved to the Golden State in the 1910s and Twenties than in the Thirties. Bad Land marks a subtle but crucial departure from Raban’s earlier narratives, however. Old Glory, his modern re-enactment of Huckleberry Finn, is governed by the powerful current of the Mississippi. Coasting, his state-of-Britain book undertaken from the vantage of his ...”

“... habit; Shane McGowan falls apart under the influence of amphetamines and alcohol; David Crosby and Stephen Stills are ‘too coked-up all the time’ to keep their band together; and – playing in front of a ‘zombie’ audience – the New York Dolls announce their desire to be ‘the tackiest boys in New York’ and no one, but no one, is arguing. In the ...”

“... and English’. We might assume that Joyce continued to take the bus. (At 11 a.m., doesn’t Stephen Dedalus travel by public transport on his way from the school in Dalkey?) Censuses may not give you the heart and soul of the country, that’s literature’s job, but they tell you the circumstances of the population on a given day, which might also be ...”