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“... piece to the earlier novel, in the sense that it too was a first-person narrative, following Edward Manners, an educated and attractive young man, in his cultural and sexual adventures. Hollinghurst extended his range abroad, with much of the book set in Belgium, and may even have taken Baker’s reference to overemphasis on sex as a challenge, in his ...”

“... Sometimes to re-create a colourful milieu, as with the unusual hunting novelist Mrs Edward Kennard, who at 50 in 1900 was a keen auto-mobilist: ‘Reviewers liked her slapdash, highly ungrammatical style of writing in which they discerned “lots of go” and a “thoroughly healthy tone”.’ The plots are often more or less absurd, and ...”

“... he wrote on 28 July 1914. Germany he saw as the ultimate bulwark against Russian barbarism. ‘Sir Edward Grey has betrayed us,’ he wrote on 5 August 1914. On this issue, shattered though he was at the time, he came to change his mind. In Lord Grey of the Reform Bill (1920) he saw the war as having ‘been fought on the principles of Fox and Grey’, and in ...”

“... anthology may not begin with ‘Sunday Morning’, but Jonathan Barker suggests that Ron Butlin, James Lasdun, Oliver Reynolds and other talents have been influenced, like Vendler’s Americans, by the world of Canon Aspirin. This seems doubtful. To read the PBS volume after the Faber Book is to be almost crushed by the pressure of social detail. It is to ...”

“... This conviction even leads him in the last Discourse to quote with approval the opinion of James Harris that ‘we are on no account to expect that fine things should descend to us’ – ‘our taste, if possible, must be made to ascend to them.’ Hence Reynolds endorses the recommendation ‘even to feign a relish, till we find a relish comes; and ...”

“... most playful. But the presence of the Great Modernists feels as remote and irrelevant as that of Edward Marsh’s Georgians.Larkin, the lonely fugitive from poetic Modernism, now looks suspiciously like a one-man tradition. So standard an item in recent collections has the Philip Larkin Memorial Poem become that it now exists as a genre in its own ...”

“... passes as white to marry well. What sets Larsen’s novels apart from other such narratives – James Weldon-Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912), for example – is their resistance to moral didacticism. For one character, passing is merely a question of convenience: ‘restaurants, theatre tickets’. Larsen was born in Chicago in ...”

“... to Arms. The desire for combat is paramount. ‘Not everyone feels such things so intensely,’ James Fenton writes in his introduction to the Everyman edition of the Collected Stories. Many are simply relieved not to have to fight. But the real test for someone of Hemingway’s cast of mind is: to serve in war as a soldier under military ...”

“... pushed a younger child into a vessel of hot water with fatal results. During the reign of Edward I, a pardon was extended to a child under seven, even though, by then, it was laid down that a child under seven could not be convicted of felony. Much later, in 1748, William York, aged ten, murdered a child of five and buried her in a dunghill. ‘When ...”

“... excuse for Tory austerity, itself an excuse for dismantling the state. And, as Geoffrey Evans and James Tilley argue in their formidably well-evidenced The New Politics of Class, New Labour’s decision to stop talking about the ‘working-class’ marginalised millions of people.2 It isn’t that class ceased to exist, or that people ceased to feel they ...”

“... Sad Shepherd – remember or re-enact the paradigmatic story of Robin Hood. In George Peele’s Edward I, the Welsh bandit Prince Lluellen and his followers give their cause a veneer of mischievous attractiveness by assuming the guise of Robin Hood and his men; while in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor the lawless antics of Falstaff ...”

“... clinching evidence of the Hills’ reliability.The UFO Incident, a film about the Hills, starring James Earl Jones as Barney and Estelle Parsons as Betty, was broadcast by NBC in October 1975, bringing their story to millions of American households. It suited the paranoid mood of the times. Two weeks after watching it, Travis Walton, a forestry worker, was ...”

“... off-key suggestion that the secret services should be recruiting in Bradford rather than St James’s (apparently on the grounds that immigrants would find it easier than Old Etonians to disguise themselves as Islamic extremists). But almost the oddest response has been our terrified certainty that there remains a plentiful supply of suicide pilots and ...”

“... upstate New York doctor, George Sumner Huntington, who specified its symptoms in 1872; Parkinson (James) got his tremor in 1817 and soon thereafter the great anatomist Charles Bell, whom Darwin admired, could be even more precise about ‘his’ disorder – Bell’s palsy – of the seventh cranial nerve; Alzheimer’s disease after Alois of early ...”

“... of the countryside); it had now become hard to tell the difference between them and devils. King James in his Demonology (1597) is indignant at the idea of devils who live in the storm-clouds: probably he felt that this practically lets you get back to believing in the pagan demigods. The familiar of Faust in the original German has never been to Hell at ...”