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“... lunar nowherelands. In 1681 Charles Cotton dismissed them as ‘Nature’s pudenda’; in 1775 Dr Johnson was ‘astonished and repelled’ by their ‘wide extent of hopeless sterility’ (though he at least had the hardihood to go and see them for himself); in 1826 Noel Thomas Carrington accused them of ‘shaming the map of England’ with their ...”

“... Like many before him (Leavis, for one), Trotter believes that the common reader as Samuel Johnson conceived of him and relied on him was already disappearing from the scene by the time Johnson died. Trotter strikes out on his own by pondering the significance in this respect of a figure like Wordsworth’s ‘Old ...”

“... include Michael Bracewell, Dick Hebdige, Lynne Tillman, Kathy Acker, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Johnson, W.G. Sebald. The eateries and supermarkets of Aberdeen are visited, and rendered, as far as I can see, entirely accurately. (I come from Aberdeen, which is how I’d know.) Ditto the hills walked and the stone circles visited. Ditto the dream-tour, in ...”

“... identical conditions for withdrawal, but under less shameful and deceitful circumstances, to which Johnson and even Humphrey had been ready to accede in 1968. Quite hardened men on Kissinger’s own staff were able to see the gruesome fallacy. ‘We bombed the North Vietnamese into accepting our concessions,’ drily remarked John Negroponte, a rough-stuff ...”

“... provided by the Norwegians.’ Clinton’s Secretary of State, the sad and inadequate Warren Christopher, learned of the breakthrough only shortly before everybody else did. Much of the Israel lobby in the US was and is hostile to the agreement. During Likud’s years of power in Israel, the lobby had imbibed Likud’s views, in accordance with its usual ...”

“... papers). Valerie Eliot has now allowed the entire notebook to be published, superbly edited by Christopher Ricks, whose T.S. Eliot and Prejudice is still the most acute and fine-grained investigation of the vexed question of the place of prejudice in Eliot’s writing.It is impossible to over-praise Ricks’s work in this edition. His annotations draw on ...”

“... After the annals of sexual prowess, the annals of sexual infirmity. After Kinsey, Masters and Johnson – ‘it was around the clitoris that they made major discoveries.’ Sex is a problem because it is no longer supposed to be a problem. ‘Throughout history men have boasted of their conquests, and in liberated ages, women too,’ writes ...”

“... because it was foisted on poets like Donne by his critics, among them John Dryden and Samuel Johnson, whose assessments Alareer projects onto the whiteboard. The lecture builds to an analysis of Donne’s poem ‘The Bait’, which, Alareer explains, is a parody of the Christopher Marlowe poem generally known as ‘The ...”

“... Alcmanics (or is it Alcaics?) – and one of the few to describe our current impoverishments. Christopher Reid’s interrogation of language expresses itself in an interest in translationese. Katerina Brac seems to have arisen from a long immersion in Oxford and Penguin books of verse in translation. Its language is a kind of anti-dialect – English, but ...”

“... What was it that Samuel Johnson said about Laurence Sterne’s unusual novel? ‘Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.’ I wonder whether the Doctor would have said the same had he lived long enough to reach the end of The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, whose odd title is only explained on page 584, when we come across a quote from The Alchemist ...”

“... Sidmouth strategy. For they cannot help reminding us, rather forcibly, of the Five Acts that Boris Johnson’s government passed in March and April 2022. In both sets of laws, the justification is nugatory, the likely effect questionable and the side effects shameful; but the politics are blatant. The Five Acts are worth examining singly and collectively in ...”

“... And yes, yes, when you rehit town next month we must arrange for you to meet her,’ he writes to Christopher Fry in 1952. This shrugging nonchalance successfully camouflages the scrabbling lengths to which he went in order to forge this Hepburn connection. As his wife tells us in a footnote, Tynan had met Hepburn only once before, on the set of The African ...”

“... of preparing the public with pious cant about ‘abundance and peace as the legacies left Johnson by Kennedy’. ‘A writer who can be so universally admiring,’ I.F. Stone said about White, ‘need never lunch alone.’ But Cockburn is equally – and occasionally even more – uncompromising in his attacks upon the well-intentioned liberal, who is ...”

“... Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities and Society in England, 1830-1960, published in 1998, Christopher Stray traced the rise and fall of a High Victorian conception of the study of ancient Greece and Rome as offering ‘large-scale visions of value – rules of taste and morality, images of the good life’. According to Stray, Classics was a means for ...”

“... The past is there to be made use of, and everyone makes use of it in his own way. Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson invent alternative Englands where radical social experiments were nipped in the bud by the entrenched forces of reaction, while T.S. Eliot’s successors imagine devout cavaliers preserving a unified sensibility in economic and spiritual matters ...”