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“... the previously disenfranchised (although that was part of it): more graduates meant more GNP. The Wilson Government which inherited Robbins (originally a One-Nation Tory initiative) identified itself strongly with the optimistic view that higher education was the locomotive of economic growth. Thatcherism took an opposite view. It saw no correlation between ...”

“... In 1912, his Nude Descending a Staircase had been rejected by the hanging committee of the Salon des Indépendants in Paris; when the painting appeared in New York at the Armory Show the next year, the New York Times declared it ‘an explosion in a shingle factory’. It seemed he had a succès de scandale on his hands, but he wasn’t yet ready to make ...”

“... like when talking to itself. The editor is the mysterious (but no doubt highly decorated) Major Des Astor, and he gets us off to a gentle start. ‘The first time you meet members of the British army, you could easily be forgiven for thinking that rather than a big cohesive whole, what you’ve actually come across is a group of fiercely xenophobic ...”

“... this a spa?’ the valetudinarian out of Europe might say. ‘Where is your Grand Parc des Sources? Where are your salles de pulvérisation? And your first-class gargling-room? Have you no radioactive muds? We do not ask for dew-treading meadows, but what about a quiet garden with rows of brine-soaked hedges?’ The hard truth is that Britons lost ...”

“... Not many readers will get the allusion here to Tocqueville and Beaumont in America by George Wilson Pierson, published in 1938 and for a long time the standard account of the nine-month journey which Tocqueville undertook with his friend Gustave de Beaumont, ostensibly for the purpose of writing a report on the American prison system, but which also gave ...”

“... RUE DU BAC (DUBONNET)            SOLFERINO (DUBONNET)            CHAMBRE DES DEPUTESBrekekekek coax coax we are passing under the Seine                        DUBONNETThe Scarlet Woman shouting BYRRH and deafeningSt John at Patmos                        Vous descendez Madame?   QUI SOUVENT SE PESE BIEN SE ...”

“... on their way from the daycare centre: his name, in Latin form, was Hugonicus Davidis.The Rue des CarmesThere is a short street near the place de la République called the rue des Carmes. It has a dog-leg bend in it, and just at the bend is the doorway of a bookshop specialising in small-press poetry books. You learn ...”

“... Dylan Thomas, Octavio Paz, Louis Zukofsky and Charles Olson. As did any number of critics: Edmund Wilson, Harry Levin, Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, Guy Davenport. Were all of them hornswoggled, taken in by the surface polish and acrobatics of Cummings’s style and, those who knew him, by his great personal charm, unable to register the paucity of ...”

“... to read them. One must acknowledge, however, that Richard Cobb is not Frank Kermode, nor Angus Wilson D.P. Walker. I had come knowing what Britain’s preconceived ideas were: her pragmatism and refusal of abstraction, her solitary traditions and diehard taste for erudition and travail honnête, however ungratifying; knowing, too, that my stock of clichés ...”

“... weren’t good. The world’s oldest anti-colonial tradition wasn’t showing much fresh thinking. Des Dalton, the vice president of Republican Sinn Féin, spent most of his time on the platform reading passages from Eire Nua, a programme drafted by the Provos in the early 1970s. There was no attempt to explain how that document (a rather charming vision of an ...”

“... exquisitely bound volume from Notting Hill Editions, with a justly amused introduction by Frances Wilson: ‘Few writers have received more applause than Thomas Bernhard, Austrian novelist, playwright and enfant terrible, and few have bitten more sharply the hand that clapped.’ But, still staggering on, the effort continues. James Reidel, who in 2006 ...”

“... weaving the naked body through a world of charged theatrical props (Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson) and exploring sado-masochism reminiscent of Surrealism (Gina Pane, Valie Export). Given the ephemerality of ‘performance’ as a medium, it was natural that these artists would either turn to a recording medium like video or film, or attempt to ...”

“... published in France in 1817, the princess’s prison journal was translated into English by John Wilson Croker in 1823. Croker noted that several passages are obscure, and one or two contradictory: there are frequent repetitions, and a general want of arrangement. All these, which would be defects in a regular history, increase the value of this ...”

“... When they arrived they were tested on a field rented by one of the Committee, Walter Gordon Wilson, a specialist in gearboxes and a brilliant mechanical engineer. Swinton had the initial vision: Wilson made it into reality. In June 1915 Swinton, still unaware of the existence of the Landships Committee, wrote a ...”

“... end of line – “rose”’): ‘It’s very tempting, my dear.’ Very. As in ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, which describes Bruegel’s Icarus, in which ‘the sun shone/As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green/Water’. This slight pause or swoop tells of a captivation that exists before, and possibly after, any considered judgment ...”