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“... seventy-five years. How did it happen? On that question, Lubenow is wisely silent. He quotes Sir Donald MacAlister’s claim that ‘the voice that issues from the hearth-rug on Saturday night has gone through all the earth, its sound to the world’s end. It speaks in Senates though men know it not, it controls principalities and powers, it moulds ...”

“... of tiresome people from the Daily Express. (Wodehouse’s relationship with the Waughs – Alec, Arthur and Evelyn – must be somebody’s thesis.) ‘Over Seventy’ was first published in 1957 when Wodehouse was 76. It is not as funny as the first book in the trilogy, ‘Bring on the girls’ (1954). This is a fanciful memoir about his life as a Broadway ...”

“... he went to direct the John Innes Horticultural Institution in 1910 (before the five years were up, Arthur Balfour’s benefaction had enabled the University to establish a permanent Professorship of Genetics, held by R.C. Punnett and then R.A. Fisher). MacKenzie is thus wrong in detail, but would in any case have been wrong to regard as necessarily ...”

“... which experience and its necessary objects disappear.’ So it’s beside the point to say, with Donald Davie in Purity of Diction in English Verse, that in ‘The Sensitive Plant’ and ‘The Witch of Atlas’ Shelley ‘takes a common object such as a rose or a boat, and the more he describes it, the less we remember what it is.’ Or to refer, with ...”

“... he offers up is fanciful, contrived. Like Marshall Walker’s dutiful assemblage of notecards (‘Arthur Miller studies the relation between society and the individual in terms of three clearly identifiable themes’), it assumes an orderly progression of influence, of decades and periods, of regional writers and schools and themes, of a ‘usable ...”

“... the line of great dead critics – Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold, T.S. Eliot, Trilling and Donald Davie. If, as I believe, this volume does add up to a book, in fact a considerable one, it is artfully shaped as a study of bereavement and of commemoration – not least, as a tribute paid by one of the living to great artists. An essay on Marlowe sets ...”

“... Kennan’s strategy of ‘containment’. More objectionable still are the parallels drawn by Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice between the Cold War democratisation of West Germany and Japan and today’s project of bringing democracy to the Middle East. The only parallel evident at the moment would be along the lines not of democratisation but ...”

“... early reviews must have made depressing reading for a beleaguered poet. Everybody remembers that Arthur Waugh likened the work of Eliot to the Spartan custom of exhibiting a drunken slave to show young men ‘the ignominious folly’ of debauchery. (Pound replied that he would like to make an anthology of the work of drunken helots or Heliots, if he could ...”

“... with what was now being termed an ‘imperial presidency’ (the title of an influential book by Arthur Schlesinger Jr, published in 1973, which argued that with superpower status the American executive was exceeding its constitutional prerogatives). The Trilateral Commission – a discussion group founded by David Rockefeller to bring together ...”

“... brilliance and rags-to-riches narrative. The epilogue to the American edition quoted Donald Trump, who claimed Wedgwood would have been honoured to be described as a tycoon. (This might say more about the publishers’ desire for a good quote than it does about Trump’s interest in jasperware.) Hunt offers an analogy that probably fits his own ...”

“... an entire career), possible in the first place. Witness, his own work, had a marked influence on Arthur Koestler and on Czeslaw Milosz and is, indeed, the nativist American equivalent of Darkness at Noon or The Captive Mind. With its ostentatious religiosity and its relentless emphasis on redemption and conversion – and its subplot concerning the triumph ...”

“... the critics and bankrupted him – this despite a Cannes award and a distinguished cast, including Donald Sutherland as Jesus Christ. Trumbo’s career recovered and he paid off his debts by working on big-budget projects like Papillon (1973). Dalton Trumbo (1977), Bruce Cook’s genial and thorough biography, suggests that the life he designed for himself ...”

“... out. He takes polite issue with Stead over Four Quartets, and, like Stead, traces the course of Donald Davie’s relationship with Pound as a sort of fever-chart of English Poundianism. He also includes a review of C. David Heymann’s book The Last Rower, a book Stead barely mentions, though it is relevant to a study of that political ‘extravagance’ we ...”

“... later, Cranmer rammed through both houses of Convocation the declaration that Henry’s brother Arthur had ‘carnally known’ Catherine of Aragon and so Henry’s first marriage was unlawful and he was free to marry Anne Boleyn (which he had already done in secret). Within a week, the busy new archbishop had also rammed the Restraint of Appeals Bill ...”

“... broader public. Many of them were historians, including Daniel Boorstin, Richard Hofstadter and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Invocations of history punctuated debates over the Cold War, civil rights and Vietnam. But none of these ‘public intellectuals’ reached a larger audience or had a greater social and political impact than C. Vann Woodward, whose books ...”