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“... history of many things, but in most places, at most times, and for most people, it was and is as Thomas Gray described it in 1750: ‘the short and simple annals of the poor’. So far so good. But if poverty is promoted from a platitude to a problem, things become much more difficult. For the problems of poverty are simple yet complex: what is poverty? And ...”

“... Conquest of the Useless; and Bruce Robinson’s farcical Künstlerroman, The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman. However, I’m not so sure Cronenberg’s filmic output is equal to that of Jean Cocteau, Marguerite Duras or Peter Handke. Part of the problem with creative polymaths is that on exposure to their work in a new medium the viewer, reader or listener ...”

“... absence of metaphor from these poems, therefore, what we are offered instead tends to be a brand of sophistical discourse. What is one to make of a sentence like this? For mile and moment are no larger than Each other is. Apart from advertising the poet’s familiarity with the concepts of space and time, what does this self-cancelling statement ...”

“... by raising the magic wand of “falsifiability”.’ Later he regarded Popper – and even Thomas Kuhn, who taught that scientific doctrines come and go like women’s hair styles – as too conservative in his critique. Meanwhile, Feyerabend got an academic job, and in 1955 ‘began what is technically known as my career’. He was hired by the ...”

“... he published his first short-story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. This was praised by Thomas Pynchon as well as Wolff, and since then Saunders has been about as successful as a scrupulous writer of offbeat stories can be. He has returned to the writing-school circuit as a teacher and collected numerous National Magazine and O. Henry Awards. Each ...”

“... on the street – selling reefers, procuring black women for downtown whites, refilling famous-brand whisky bottles with bootleg liquor, fencing stolen goods, running numbers, carrying a pistol in the small of his back where he hoped it would escape notice in a police pat down. ‘I don’t know,’ he told Haley, ‘how I am alive to tell it today.’ In ...”

“... makes me wish I were writing about the work of Fulke Greville or Sir Walter Ralegh or Sir Thomas Wyatt. I studied English and History. In English we were told almost immediately by Seamus Deane that we must bring nothing of ourselves, of our personal experience to a poem when we read. A poem was a verbal structure, and our job was to define the nature ...”

“... Bacon’s the tobacconist, and on Bacon’s wall, if it stands yet, there’s an engraved poem by Thomas Calverley of which I can still quote a stave or two when maundering over the port and nuts (before the brandy stage): Thou who when cares attack, bidst them avaunt and black Care from the horseman’s back, vaulting unseatest. Sweet when blah blah in ...”

“... in the collective bloodstream, and our sense of Eliot’s personal ownership of the Prufrock ‘brand’ is very different today from what it must have been at the time. In New Bearings in English Poetry, Leavis dismissed Cunard’s Parallax, published in 1925 by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, as ‘simple imitation’ of The Waste Land. This seems wrong ...”

“... the engine, which he has swathed in an enormous horse-blanket, just in case, and has lit a popular brand of cigarette, which he smokes hands deep in pockets. The well-wrapped-up four-year-old has run several times around the party, almost knocking over the soup, and now makes for the pinewood which climbs the valley to the left of the picnic. On the other side ...”

“... we have no reason to believe that the wheel has stopped turning. I quote from a letter written by Thomas Mann to an unidentified questioner in 1932, partly because Mann is a character as little Shelleyan as may be, and he is here employing a language so remote from grandiosity as to sound like a bureaucratic minute: I regard art as a primal phenomenon that ...”

“... nightmare: Englishness lost, identity cancelled, fatal infection,’ David Seabrook writes of Thomas De Quincey. Of himself, the dole-queue De Quincey, making a high-velocity, long-term progress through the Isle of Thanet. More speed, less haste: Seabrook is a master of the throwaway put-down, a speculator in tachist topography. The short haul, down the ...”

“... of the Dogme95 manifesto. ‘Today a technological storm is raging,’ he and his cosignatory Thomas Vinterberg wrote, ‘the result of which will be the ultimate democratisation of the cinema. For the first time, anyone can make movies. But the more accessible the medium becomes, the more important the avant-garde.’ The manifesto contained a vow of ...”

“... the neglected men I have found Robert Bage, Henry Brooke, John Bunyan, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, Charles Johnstone, Charles Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], ...”

“... and informative, although some of the history is shaky. For example, Goodrich attempts to connect Thomas More’s defence of ecclesiastical interpretative prerogative to Edward Coke’s similar claims for legal expertise, without apparently being aware that More’s own concept of law was essentially transparent. In contrast to matters divine, More desired ...”