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“... other people’s intellectual deficiencies, or the loss of background information, are rebuked by John Hamilton: ‘Preposterous as it may sound, this book earnestly considers the possibility of Pindar’s obscurity’ – that is to say, deliberate obscurity. However, though Hamilton is not afraid to engage with Pindar, he is more concerned with more recent ...”

“... plentiful in her difficult marriage to the austere and often deeply depressed philosopher of law, John Austin. The confidences Sarah Austin unfolds in letter after letter are akin to a disrobing of her personality, even her person, as she reveals and boasts about her sensuality, passionate nature, physical attractions and sexual interests. The circumstances ...”

“... said: ‘It’s only that the sink got blocked yesterday evening.’   It sounded so horribly gray, and she looking out with that expression of permanence. Then at once he knew he had been right, and that the girl at the dry cleaner’s had something of his mother: it was the core of permanence. Then Clay grew excited. The awkwardly overdone obviousness ...”

“... he wrote in 1971. ‘Is there a single memorable aperçu in all his letters? The contrast with Gray, or Keats, or even Hopkins, is glaring.’ Ignoring Pope’s outsider status, a product of his Roman Catholic faith and his physical handicap, some self-proclaimed New Historicists have slandered him as an apologist for such establishment vices as ...”

“... is the route by which d became t?’ Changing states attract Prynne’s attention much as they did John Donne’s. Here we don’t get ‘gold to ayery thinnesse beat’ or flesh ‘calcined’ into dust. Instead we have syrups, doughs, pastries, and snow that melts into slush: images of reconstitution and dissolution. The first volume included in Poems is ...”

“... In May 1983 he was promoted to assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Vessey, and over the next couple of years he oversaw a secret team – operating in part out of the office of Daniel Murphy, Bush’s chief of staff – which quietly conducted at least 35 covert operations against drug trafficking, terrorism and, most ...”

“... like Joseph Heller and publish a novel every seven years or so, or a “brilliant” writer like John Gardner and write obscure books for bright academics who eat macrobiotic foods and drive old Saabs with faded but still legible GENE McCARTHY FOR PRESIDENT stickers on the rear bumpers.’ Instead of which he is the ‘King of Horror’ who had his face on ...”

“... as party leader also felt constrained to observe the Home Rule commitments of his predecessor, John Smith. Of course, once devolution had been achieved, matters were simpler: as members of a UK-wide party, Labour politicians in the new Scottish Parliament were expected to follow the party line dictated by Blair from London, notwithstanding the supposed ...”

“... as a lone figure on the high snow slopes. ‘His gesture was courtly in salutation,’ wrote Basil Gray: ‘he enjoyed conversation, but never spoke himself unless he had something to say.’ His voice was likened to an autumnal wind passing through the reeds. It was accepted, however, by those who knew him that his emotional life was totally consumed by his ...”

“... or, How to (De)Flower the Rectal Brain: the Increments and Excrements of “Influence” in Dorian Gray and Edward II’ (this, incidentally, is what passes for Wildean wit at the MLA); ‘Teledildonics: Virtual Lesbians in the Fiction of Jeanette Winterson’; or the terser, but sublimely opaque ‘Autophagy and the Logic of the Absolute Fragment’. These ...”

“... and the Mirror’, ‘what relief have you but in an ever giddier collective gallop ... toward the gray horizon of the bleaker vision ... what goal but the black stone on which the bones are cracked, for only there in its cry of agony can your existence find at last an unequivocal meaning and your refusal to be yourself become a serious despair?’ This ...”

“... young men’ – James again – as Oliver Wendell Holmes, the future legal scholar John Chipman Gray, and James himself. If Gordon tends to assume rather than show that Woolson’s work has been underrated, her respectful account is a welcome alternative to Edel’s faint condescension; and she makes a ...”

“... two decades could be summed up in a single title, it would surely be ‘Lost in the Funhouse’. John Barth’s short story, published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1967, was a composite text in which an account of a family’s visit to a fairground was spliced in with what appeared to be a set of instructions from a fiction-writer’s manual. The funhouse (in ...”

“... one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible.’ Hobsbawm, John Gray and others have claimed that the Manifesto remains a momentous work because it foretold the inexorable course of globalisation. The problem is, Marx did not warn against globalisation: he welcomed it. Indeed he exalted it. It spelled, he ...”

“... as a model for his rural descriptions, praises Bacon and Locke, refers to the poetry of Thomas Gray, Allen Ramsay and Oliver Goldsmith, casually mentions that he does not need to read David Hume on miracles, and obliquely compares his own work with that of Milton? There is a paradox here: the more Bewick strove to establish his credentials as an ...”