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“... freedom of register was partly a result of his squirearchical background: he was a descendant of Richard Empson, a loathed minister of Henry VII, and grew up in a manor house in Yorkshire. He read maths and then English in the Cambridge of Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, but the biggest influence on him was his supervisor, I.A. Richards, who advocated ...”

“... but also to educate them in new musical trends, and major works by Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Richard Strauss were premiered at the Proms before the First World War. But in the beginning, Wood’s programmes were much less demanding, often consisting of many short items, so as not to bore the audience. This was especially true of the early final ...”

“... since it is the thing which, if it goes wrong, could break our polity. In the words of Mervyn King’s last speech as governor of the Bank of England, at Mansion House on 19 June: the sheer size and complexity of global banks have led to failures of governance.Governments, regulators, prosecutors and non-executive directors have all struggled to come to ...”

“... ever seen. I text my friends a picture of it, to give them an idea of the infant’s proportions. King Baby, I call him, and steal looks at him throughout the flight; reassured, protected, in the presence of a monument.At the airport, I text my Lady’s Companion, my friend Hope. ‘Were you joking when you invited me to come with you to Rome?’ she wrote to ...”

“... out in a group of ambitious black male writers who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s and included Richard Wright (born 1908), Ralph Ellison (1914) and James Baldwin (1924), Himes has never quite entered the pantheon. His peers were condescending: Wright never took him seriously as an artist; Ellison, who saw him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked ...”

“... of Great White Males (Styron, Norman Mailer, James Jones, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, the recently retired Philip Roth), whose ghostly father and bearded Neptune disturbing the liquor cabinet deep into the night was Ernest Hemingway. Even those least influenced by Hemingway’s style couldn’t fail to register the ...”

“... discipline by including previously unpublished essays on Beckett’s Endgame and Shakespeare’s King Lear, both written in a new and freer style that was (as he puts it) ‘for richer, or poorer, rather over the edge’. Since then, he has made a habit of defying professional expectations, commenting extensively on film and also on Thoreau and ...”

“... a study of Dylan’s lyrics.1 Day was on a panel discussing Dylan’s purported sexism with Richard Brown (Leeds University, Joyce), Neil Corcoran (Sheffield University, modern poetry) and Kath Burlinson, who has just stopped being half of the cabaret act ‘The Wild Girls’ and has settled down to do a PhD in 19th-century women’s poetry. Victorian ...”

“... snobbish about its Dutch origins and its tulip festival, and named after our least successful king, James II, when he was Duke of York and Albany. One year, when I told friends in Manhattan that I was going to Albany to hear the hippy, marijuana-influenced poems of a Londoner who was living with another poet, half-Negro and half-Cherokee, the New York ...”

“... and park of circa 1700 in which we overhear a scene from Pamela, and then becomes a painting by Richard Wilson with figures from Peregrine Pickle. Thereafter we are led through Gainsborough’s Forest with a guest appearance by Sterne, Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, a John Martin and a Turner, with snatches of poems by Wordsworth and ...”

“... written down over the past seven centuries, than the ‘Victorian coronation of Shakespeare as the King of Poets’. Willinsky devotes two chapters to the OED as ‘Shakespeare’s Dictionary’. Elsewhere he notes the exclusion of the vernacular, the dialects of business, trade, music-hall, barrack-room, bar-room and those professional discourses not ...”

“... the work. This halt in the narrative of Priestley’s remarkable career invites comparison with Richard Holmes’s biography of Coleridge, which stopped just as his protagonist set sail in spring 1804 for Mediterranean exile, or with Janet Browne’s recent first volume of a large-scale life of Charles Darwin. Holmes asks what we might now think of ...”

“... Despite a quotation from Vile Bodies and references to Graham Greene, George Orwell and J.B. Priestley, this section is a testament to the inadequacy of written sources, on their own, when researching matters as elusive as the likely ambience in which radio programmes were heard. At one extreme, Scannell and Cardiff reproduce comic exhortations from ...”

“... must be offered. There is no point, Williams says, in imagining oneself as ‘Kant at the court of King Arthur’, judging its institutions from a universal standpoint. This is the ‘relativism of distance’ that Williams put forward in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985). It is one of his most controversial claims, and goes together with the thesis ...”

“... family, as in: ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’ (Richard Pevear/Larissa Volokhonsky). The implied proposition is that happy families are not much use to a novelist, and the next sentence confirms this view. ‘All was confusion in the Oblonskys’ house.’ Very promising. Throughout his life Vladimir Nabokov ...”