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“... In the Granada Lectures each contributor says just what one would expect him to say. Len Murray reviews the relations between the unions and governments (of either colour) and offers moderate but constructive proposals for the future, while James Prior, also in moderate terms, outlines his view of the role of the unions and describes those changes in ...”

“... crossfire from rival scholars in the letters pages of the TLS). Following the line opened by Lionel Trilling’s ‘biography of a mind’ in America and by Raymond Williams’s Arnoldian meditations in Culture and Society in Britain, Stefan Collini produced his impressive Matthew Arnold: A Critical Portrait in 1994. And there have been two cap-à-pie ...”

“... kangaroos and babyheads. He tells his story from the point of view of a Tourettic orphan called Lionel Essrog, ‘the human freakshow’, who works for a fourth-rate detective agency disguised as a taxi firm. His boss, Frank Minna, then a small-time fence, recruited Lionel and three others from the St Vincent’s Home for ...”

“... the thing for the Yellow Book. Housman was six years older than Yeats and eight years older than Lionel Johnson, but they were much more dependent than he was on the work of the Victorian era, and it was the novelty of his tone which set him apart. The moment of the break-up of existing verse-forms, with Pound and his associates, still lay ahead. Housman was ...”

“... and help liberalism become once more a ‘unifying force’ for the ‘common good’. Douglas Murray, associate editor of the Spectator, thinks that Trump might just save Western civilisation. The ideas and commitments of the new prophets of decline do not emerge from any personal experience of it, let alone adversity of the kind suffered by many voters ...”

“... an unfavourable reading of portions of the novel which he had shown to two of his friends, Albert Murray and the critic Anatole Broyard. Ellison had good reason to feel troubled. Juneteenth is a set of fragments masquerading as a whole – a Frankenstein’s monster, Louis Menand called it in the New York Times – and the simple plot line that Callahan ...”

“... provincial inanity. Rudolf Nureyev was told that he was getting his big chance on the show because Lionel Blair was indisposed; Yehudi Menuhin was told to turn up with his banjo; Alec Guinness was mistaken for ‘Mr Wise’s’ taxi-driver; the exotic and much fêted André Previn was plain ‘Mr Preview’ – the name by which, he told McCann, he is still ...”

“... dedicated and principled character – a penitent ex-Soviet agent named Gifford Maxim – in Lionel Trilling’s novel, The Middle of the Journey (also published in 1947). He is the precipitating agent, in another sense of that term, in Alistair Cooke’s great account of the time, Generation on Trial. He was the man who made Richard Nixon’s ...”

“... buoyancy’, it was extravagantly praised by more senior and noteworthy critics, including Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe and Leslie Fiedler. In the novel’s memorable first sentence, it is possible to hear an exhilaration and release missing from his two earlier books. This is Augie’s Whitmanesque introduction of himself, an introduction, too, of a ...”

“... is hardly the first study of the social psychology of Jewish emancipation. In the Seventies John Murray Cuddihy wrote on the burdens of ‘civility’ and the ordeal of becoming a gentleman. Numerous biographies of German or English Jews have examined the identity problems arising from first-generation assimilation of minority into majority cultures. It is ...”

“... Poets prize, Auden was frequently unenthused; in 1947, he awarded it to his former student Joan Murray, who had died five years earlier. Submissions in 1955 were so dismal that he privately asked John Ashbery and O’Hara for manuscripts (Ashbery’s Some Trees was the winner).Rich and her fans have bristled at some of the condescending praise her early ...”

“... newspapers. If I were a voter in the Blackburn constituency my vote would go to Craig Murray, the ex-ambassador to Uzbekistan, who resigned from the diplomatic service over the foreign secretary’s refusal to discount information obtained by torture in the prisons of Uzbekistan, a decision that means torture is likely to continue. If there is a ...”