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“... values which only the chosen few will be able to share or even decode. The irony of the Augustan masters was a sign-system of privileged implication, operating beneath a deceptive surface. The two passages I have cited are not discussed in Ehrenpreis’s book, but they are germane to it. In an earlier book of essays, Literary Meaning and Augustan ...”

“... genre conflates Groom’s forgery with his plagiarism. In 19th-century Ireland, authors like William Maginn, Francis Sylvester Mahony and James Clarence Mangan were in the habit of producing literary texts cunningly modelled on the work of some well-known author like Tennyson or Thomas Moore, which they then coolly claimed to be the lost original that ...”

“... friends, James Prior of Northern Ireland, Peter May of England, one of its cricket captains, and William Rees-Mogg, late of the Times, are among the tightest and funniest things he has written. May is present, while utterly silent, as a batsman of genius, and as a figure of fun and a pillar of rectitude during the urinous escapades which it is feared may ...”

“... are those which exclude the mots of the compiler himself. The tendency to line oneself up with the masters may be studied in Bartlett’s Unfamiliar Quotations, compiled by Leonard Louis Levenson, which contains more than a hundred and eighty entries credited to L.L.L.; in A Treasury of Humorous Quotations, compiled by Herbert V. Prochnow and Herbert ...”

“... this is a conventional work, reactionary in the extreme & dull to a degree.’ Among the dead masters Beethoven is adored, especially for Fidelio and the Missa Solemnis. Listening to Berlioz, the young man makes a nice distinction: the Symphonie Fantastique ‘isn’t much good as music’ but it’s ‘topping entertainment’. When he was at the Royal ...”

“... Men’s Association, a body which called for ‘rational’ organic reform: so organic that William Lovett, its figurehead, later turned to writing manuals on physiology, diet and anatomy. Although they drafted the original People’s Charter, Lovett’s men were soon overtaken by the Chartist leaders of the Midlands and the North: men such as Humphrey ...”

“... and the most intellectually distinguished of all European universities, the home of Duns Scotus, William Ockham and the Mertonian school. Volume III brings us to the Renaissance. We notice immediately the firm direction of the editor, James McConica, who has imposed an order on the writing of the history of the University in the 16th century that is uncommon ...”

“... lonely schoolboy from Christ’s Hospital. Through his study of the scientific work, Levere joins William Empson among others in defending the coherence of Coleridge and his metaphysics. Coleridge’s vision of a ‘dynamic’ German philosophy, pitted against Anglo-Gallic reductionism; his flirtation with chemistry ‘to improve his stock of ...”

“... stalemate and economic hardship had fuelled mass petitions and protests. The prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, had responded with draconian emergency measures, banning public meetings and prosecuting dissent as seditious libel. In 1796 a crowd of protesters – Despard among them – had besieged his home in Downing Street shouting ‘no war, no ...”

“... extracted exorbitant amounts of interest on his loans, and the unsavoury duo of Thomas Bridgen and William Holt Averell, who ended up acquiring, by various devious stratagems, much of the land and property that had made up his father’s estate. Cooper was no naif in such matters, but his situation was formidably complicated: as the youngest of four sons, he ...”

“... Elizabethans and Jacobeans, but no one else gave pride of place to the most laborious of those masters. Gurney sets no store at all by ‘spontaneity’, except as an effect, an illusion achieved by great labour. And even the effect, precisely because he had himself achieved it in his beautifully mellifluous early work – see ‘Only the Wanderer’ from ...”

“... who had had the benefit of an expensive formal education. And he was appalled to find most of the masters incapable of teaching anything except ‘that pose of boredom towards learning and everything connected with it which is notoriously part of the English public school man’s character’. The Autobiography showed that Collingwood had never learned the ...”

“... that others regard as shameful. They are powerless to resist sexual exploitation or abuse by their masters. It is not so much these actions themselves, as the stories to which they give rise and which give them meaning, that interest Gilsenan. ‘Men struggle to reproduce, memorialise and guarantee narratives of being and place in the world against the ...”

“... kitsch. (Picasso the maker of monstrosities, Picasso the woman-hater, Picasso recycler of the Old Masters.) But it did happen. Look at Pollock’s Male and Female; look at de Kooning’s Woman 1. The implacable dialectical example was not necessarily immobilising. I steer back to my topic. This balance of distance and literalness, which is modernism’s way ...”

“... had uprooted the blacks from their native culture, then sold parents and children to different masters. The historian Stanley Elkins darkened the picture by comparing slavery to the Holocaust. Like European Jews in the Nazi concentration camps, the American blacks had been so traumatised by the loss of all their old ‘family and kinship arrangements ...”