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“... literary critics think that they either could of should follow in such ugly footsteps? Leonard Jackson begins his The Poverty of Structuralism with the bald statement: ‘Modern literary theory is very strange.’ Indeed it is, but it is easier to see this than to pin down just how and why it is strange. In Addressing Frank Kermode Kermode ...”

“... reminds us, there is worse literary company than Lovecraft, Leiber, Bloch, Matheson and Jackson. ‘I could, for example, be an “important” writer like Joseph Heller and publish a novel every seven years or so, or a “brilliant” writer like John Gardner and write obscure books for bright academics who eat macrobiotic foods and drive old Saabs ...”

“... think what you did ... was so romantic.’ Tarantino says he was trying to be Elmore Leonard in this script – ‘although I’m not saying it’s as good’ – and he does get something of Leonard’s pace and complication; something of his sense of the world of cops and robbers too, a place where you ...”

“... Is there anything stranger than a pop star out of time? Before Elvis Presley, before Michael Jackson, there was Al Jolson – ‘the most popular entertainer of the first half of the 20th century,’ as Michael Rogin describes him. Eyes wide and mouth agape, arms outstretched and face painted black, Jolson concludes his performance in The Jazz Singer (1927) down on one knee, serenading the delighted actress who plays his mother in a voice as strong and piercing as a foghorn ...”

“... to make up for Woolf’s (almost) non-appearance at Harrison’s funeral, when Virginia and Leonard arrived so late that they only ‘marched in’ (Virginia’s words) as the service was ending. Characteristically, perhaps, she blamed their lateness on the funeral’s unfashionable location in East Finchley: ‘somewhere out of the world where buses ...”

“... its likes + dislikes + its reliance on taste or memory’, as he would later explain to the poet Jackson Mac Low. His piece Williams Mix (1953), intricately spliced together from six hundred sections of pre-recorded electromagnetic tape, and his solo piano work, Music of Changes (1951), were assembled using instructions divined from the I Ching. But by the ...”

“... of the self-involvement of (say) Alain Besançon, the humourless righteousness of Richard Pipes or Leonard Schapiro’s cold disdain. There was a jokey, blokey aspect to Conquest, a whiff of the Oxford debating society and student satirical review, that made him an anomalous figure in international Sovietology, which – apart from Abe Brumberg’s ...”

“... with Britain’s imperial diaspora. Although other scholars such as Howard Lamar and the late Leonard Thompson have also explored these comparisons, the ‘opening’ of the West – even before Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis – has always been an important part of a self-congratulatory and inward-looking ...”

“... would be great fun to sit down and invent stories’) and sometimes felt badly treated by her and Leonard Woolf. Believing, not incorrectly, that his work was sloppy, they turned down several essays he submitted to the Hogarth Press. ‘I do think Virginia is exceedingly tiresome,’ Julian complained to his mother after his aunt had criticised his essay on ...”

“... 1962. The other was The New Poetry, also published in 1962. Edited by A. Alvarez, it had a crazy Jackson Pollock painting on the cover. In the Allott anthology I was intrigued by some of the poems that came towards the end, most notably Jon Silkin’s ‘Death of a Son’, whose last line (‘And out of his eyes two great tears rolled, like stones, and he ...”

“... arranged for a portrait of Harriet Tubman, the former slave and abolitionist, to replace Andrew Jackson, the slave owner known as the Indian Killer, on the $20 bill. Steve Mnuchin, the secretary of the treasury, states that this will not be possible until at least 2028 and probably not at all. Trump has a portrait of ...”

“... Kallmann can be understood in this context, or the relationship between James Merrill and David Jackson. This, more likely, was the stamp and seal of the love between Wilde and Douglas. In the years which followed their meeting we get two versions of Wilde’s feelings for Douglas. In July 1894, he wrote: ‘It is really absurd. I can’t live without ...”