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“... by incomparable endowment: the culture-laden Crown of a pre-eminently civilised state whose riches eclipse all meaner forms of ideological cement. Only lesser breeds need incantations of a community to come. It is the protagonists of a confined and ethnic cause who require idioms and songs to keep their collective spirits up, or the antics of the Gaelic ...”

“... and enmities, its experiences of modernity and colonisation – has to be a complex one. The riches and idiosyncrasies of Urdu writing must be one antecedent, as an ur-literature which is seldom invoked but which must inform the work. Urdu’s fastidious formalism, the predominance of the short form in its 20th-century fiction, could help explain, for ...”

“... Britain (an honour Freud, much to Jones’s chagrin, later conferred on Jones’s friend and rival David Eder). He was Freud’s chief administrator and enforcer – he served as president of the International Psychoanalytic Association from 1920 to 1924 and again from 1932 to 1949 – and his most enthusiastic missionary. He did more than anyone to ...”

“... the later years of the reign, after the swift conquest of the Avars and the acquisition of their riches in 796, government loomed larger than war. The poetry of Charlemagne’s court can be read as a code which, once cracked, introduces some of the men around him. Audulf, for example, was a noble on whom he relied from 799 onwards as his chief official in ...”

“... Oxford History of France volumes on the central and later Middle Ages, edited by Marcus Bull and David Potter respectively, also highlight the formation of a ‘French sense of identity’. Although the role of the king in consolidating power and extending territory is emphasised in all of these books, it is seen as only one aspect of political ...”

“... across the screen, the vocalist makes his entry. It’s Tony Bennett singing ‘From Rags to Riches’. The film is Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990). All kinds of things are going on here, artful, intelligent, violent and ironic. The broadest effect is that of the song, with its implication of a sarcasm as old as gangster movies ...”

“... a sizeable proportion of the detailed evidence we have about him dates from May and June 1593. For David Riggs, coming to the subject of Marlowe after writing Ben Jonson: A Life (1989), the paucity of material must have been fairly dismaying. The long-lived Jonson went out of his way to make things easy for biographers, leaving an extensive paper trail ...”

“... first as a friend of Leigh Hunt and then as a friend of Walter Savage Landor), but cites instead David Lynch, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Marcel Duchamp, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, Hugo Ball, Geoff Dyer, Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis.Lamb deserves​ much ...”

“... before men had a word for it. How indeed could they have a word for it until it had happened? David Underdown, one of the five big names contributing to this festschrift, has a characteristically wise survey of ‘Community and Class’ in the English Revolution. Disregarding Hexter’s prohibitions, he concludes: ‘The Marxist model of local political ...”

“... the horror, hence no guilt about it, and so his revulsion from it is manageable. He is nearer to David Jones; one ‘soldiers on’. His revulsion and protest come later, when post-war England makes light of its soldiers’ sacrifices: ‘How England should take as common their vast endurance/ And let them be but boys having served time overseas.’ As ...”

“... a landed tradition not unrelated to that of the Russian gentry, an amused disdain for the nouveaux riches of the Gründerzeit (those decades of feverish industrial and financial development after 1870), and a fellow-travelling ideological weakness for revolution (he fought in 1848) and later on for the nascent socialist movement and the naturalist literature ...”

“... from his friends what he later felt had been severe mental suffering, not least when his brother David fell to his death from a hotel window at the age of 19; most of all, he concealed the Game, and had a lifelong terror of people finding out about it. He admired Rimbaud and drank heavily; Barbara tried to coax him away from the bottle. He went off to Spain ...”

“... one reading. Jenkins’s social trajectory has sometimes been represented as a classic rags-to-riches story, but the reality was more complex (to his credit, Jenkins himself rarely attempted to play the proletarian card). It is true that his father began his working life as a miner, but he soon moved into trade-union activity and was the miners’ agent ...”

“... essays – during the period of composition the world does nothing but give you gifts.They love David Foster Wallace here, and I have read no one but him for months. His books are everywhere in tall voluble stacks – a writer is always everywhere when you are working on them. I feel partially disrobed when I see his name. At my sickest, I had begun asking ...”

“... way with an anecdote. Perhaps the most useful thing a reviewer can do is to signal some of the riches this huge volume contains, and, risking the author’s disdain for such schematising, make a few suggestions about their possible significance. Insofar as the information can be marshalled into supporting any kind of narrative, it tells an everyday story ...”