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“... was established in 1860, Thackeray broke with Punch in 1851 (by which time he had written two major novels), and wrote only occasionally until 1854, when he ceased contributing altogether. There are too many of these mistakes of elementary detail for a work of reference. All of which is a pity, since this volume and the series generally is intelligently ...”

“... lightly masked by an insistence on the ‘difficulty’ of political and cultural judgment. The major casualty of this insistence is Williams’s prose. What may indeed be complexity in the phenomena often comes out in this prose merely as a portentous haze. But when the haze is penetrated, some things remain exceedingly simple. What Williams trusts in is ...”

“... murderous suspects. That policy might be callously wrong, and the Police Department overdue for major overhaul (as Bradley’s Christopher Commission had asserted when it reported in July 1991). But the jurors were pronouncing on individual guilt, not city governance. Koon had offered a Nuremberg defence: he was merely following standard operating ...”

“... technology: not for them slips of paper. B. Dalton was fully computerised by 1966 – the first major bookseller in the country to be so. Electronics had not merely revolutionised retail selling but had also rationalised wholesale distribution – traditionally ramshackle and inefficient in the book trade. Until the 1960s (the all-change decade for the ...”

“... markets can measure and therefore like, and uncertainty, which they can’t and therefore hate.) A major contributor to this sense of unchartedness was the decision by the ratings agency Standard and Poor’s to downgrade US government debt from AAA to AA+ status. This might seem like a small technical point, and it’s worth noting that the downgrade had no ...”

“... wants to publish a poem, he files it to the Press Association. Every government department, every major corporation, every police service and health trust and education authority delivers its official announcements to the Press Association. It is the primary conveyor belt along which information reaches national media in Britain. The boffins in Cardiff found ...”

“... form’ from an interesting angle. How do novels use, and make us accept, differences between major and minor characters? How do narratives make their protagonists complex and credible while also creating supporting characters who lack ‘interiority’? At the heart of the book is an argument about how the apparent singularity of some of fiction’s most ...”

“... on the results of this disastrous shift in taxation, Wang Chaohua merely observes that ‘major social consequences . . . are still unfolding.’ This is putting it too mildly; as Wang Hui observes, liberals react ‘with the greatest alarm’ to any criticism of what was effectively an IMF-type reform. To be fair to Hu Angang, he has focused ...”

“... specific projects, this money – £2 billion a year – comes without strings. This is seen as a major strength of the UK research system, making it more robust and flexible. Core funding helps top up grants, which by design do not cover a project’s full costs, and contributes to big-ticket items such as buildings and fellowship programmes. It also helps ...”

“... like Bolivia or Paraguay. De Gaulle said that Chile was ‘the pilot country of Latin America’. John Gunther wrote in 1967 that Chile was ‘one of the most civilised countries in the world’, and that the general line of government was ‘roughly that of the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt or even the British Labour Party’. There is not a hint of such ...”

“... not very democratic, to approve of the reforms which Cobbett set in motion. ‘Most of the major remedial legislation,’ says George Spater, ‘urged by Cobbett and opposed by the ministers of the day, except his proposals relating to the debt, were eventually enacted into law by parliament.’ He offers a list: Cobbett’s proposals about factory ...”

“... 1805 Prelude. Johnston believes, as David Bromwich often seems to in his study of Wordsworth’s major early poems, that ‘much of his poetry is even more autobiographical than we realise.’ Wordsworth’s poems, he claims, find hauntingly metaphorical expressions for ‘the facts of his life’, thereby concealing them. The thoughts about Wordsworth that ...”

“... who light dirty and are sanctimonious about it: Lydia Lawrence and Meyers’s other bête noire, John Middleton Murry. Murry perhaps deserves what he gets (though one still wonders why Lawrence stuck to him for so long); but Lydia gets a biographical third degree. Her father is said to have ‘described himself as an engineer’ while actually being ‘a ...”

“... he would completely ignore a bill that the Congress had just passed. It is astonishing how many major players from Bush World are here Missing in Action. Entirely absent, or mentioned only in passing, are Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Yoo, Elliott Abrams, Ahmed Chalabi, Ayad Allawi, Rick Santorum, Trent Lott, Tom ...”

“... more distinguished magazines left standing ($2400 to Scrutiny in 1949, and a whopping $22,500 to John Crowe Ransom’s Kenyon Review over the course of five years, from 1947 to 1952). Literary prestige was, on occasion, converted into capital, as in the case of Cid Corman’s Origin, an important venue for Charles Olson and the Black Mountain School of ...”