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“... each experience through the literature of dead white males, yet his greatest hero is Jacques-Stephen Alexis, the radical Haitian writer murdered by Duvalier in 1961. On the moral as well as the administrative level, Ti-Cirique is vital to the survival of Texaco in its darkest hours, when it is being torn down daily at the hysterical insistence of the ...”

“... wish to go and are thought capable of staying the course.’ Maud’s pupils in politics included Stephen Spender – who does not seem to have learnt much politics anyway – and if it is not breath-taking, it does at least cause one to reflect on the insularity of the pre-war Oxford school of politics that it was only in 1938 that he ‘spotted’ the ...”

“... had been expended to bring me to New Mexico, too, along with a group of other British writers – Stephen Spender, Richard Hoggart, Margaret Drabble, Al Alvarez – and various Beat American poets and novelists (California vintage ’57), and academics from different universities, to consider such issues as ‘D. H. Lawrence and his Influence on Modern ...”

“... New World, where, in a place known as Ile Perdue, he meets a consumptive girl who bears all the marks of the noble savage. She has ‘no more religion than grass or fresh springwater has’. In Amsterdam, he befriends a freethinking Jewish philosopher (evidently modelled on Spinoza), while a further unhappy love-affair convinces him that he must face his ...”

“... peaked in the 1880s and 1890s. Orthography became important: Geoffrey or Jeffrey, Ann or Anne, Stephen or Steven. Girls’ names were especially given to whim and proliferation. In the 1930s, my mother was christened Doreen because a Russian acquaintance of my grandfather said that was the name of the nicest girl he had ever known. This nice Doreen seems ...”

“... quite forcefully onto the floor and breaks.At this point Amor is thirteen to the sixteen of Stephen King’s Carrie White, but like Carrie on the brink of her first period. Perhaps her powers have developed in the near decade since – if so, this is the only time she uses them, or the only time they use her. Whether or not she is responsible for ...”

“... than judgment and on show than study, Sloane’s collection, it seems, will not receive high marks. Attention to the problem of collecting has been high on the scholarly agenda in recent years. A Journal of the History of Collections has been founded, and a ‘new museology’ has sought to interpret the construction and meaning of such ...”

“... writer of little leaves’), normally appears in his own work as a wide-eyed naive, the easiest of marks to a swarm of fraudulent predators: so it is no surprise to be told in this first biography that he was really a crotchety manic-depressive, bilious, miserly, insecure, inadequate as a husband and a father, cold, unfaithful, vindictive and terminally ...”

“... of Criticism, hard on the heels of The Rape of Clarissa and Literary Theory: An Introduction, marks if anything an intensification of this fleet-footed pamphleteer’s progress. Eagleton’s launching-pad was the magazine Slant, a Catholic Existentialist journal which he helped to found as a Cambridge undergraduate. He was a pupil of Raymond Williams, and ...”

“... could expose Mason to comparison, not only with two serious recent biographies, of Wordsworth by Stephen Gill and of Coleridge by Richard Holmes, but with Susan Eilenberg’s persuasive book-length treatment of this very subject. Mason underplays the psychological interest of Wordsworth’s unceremonious takeover of the second edition, and (surely) its ...”

“... 20-year-old maid inaugurated a similar union, the Scottish Federation of Domestic Workers. Jessie Stephen told the assembled crowd of mistresses and maids that she was ‘out to preach the divine doctrine of discontent’. Soon blacklisted by employers – one of the dangers of unionisation – she made her way to London and joined forces with Oliver. The ...”

“... Anne’s behaviour that Henry VIII ‘may suppose it is all light words? No harm?’ Her question marks (it is clever to give this Tudor socialite the anxious rising tone of a contemporary teenager) show that she knows this isn’t true. ‘Pastime with good company: but where’s the company now? It’s cringing against the wall.’ The recurrence of ...”

“... McBride takes particular risks with her presentation of dialogue, withholding not just the marks that Joyce called ‘perverted commas’ but any help from the layout of the page. James Kelman indents his dialogue as a matter of course, and Irvine Welsh, following Joyce, accords his readers the additional courtesy of the French-style dash. McBride lets ...”

“... selections in English – a little sputter of interest from the last ten years that probably marks a diminuendo as much as a revival – only J.D. McClatchy’s makes any sort of effort to represent him in his fullness and variety, with a clutch of poems, a couple of stories, some essays, the first scene from Der Rosenkavalier, and two plays: that ...”

“... by pogoing on a typewriter. Bank staff, waitresses, children, even the drunks, have the air of Marks & Spencer management trainees. Matti Vanhanen, Finland’s cyborg-like teetotal prime minister, survived in office after ditching his mistress via text message – it’s hard to imagine Gordon Brown getting away with that. But now and again, one hears a ...”