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“... Henry VI founded Eton, his “College Roiall of oure Lady Eton”, in the year 1440.’ So says Mark Dixon in An Eton Schoolboy’s Album. He may or may not have learned much history, but somewhere along the line Dixon, who left Eton in 1980, has learned how to write in an entertaining and elegant way. I find it ...”

“... is here for tears, nothing to wail or knock the breast.’ Samson’s father, like Mark Antony, assumes that his audience could choose to mourn their dead hero either by weeping or not weeping, and that he can offer cogent reasons to move them one way or the other. In that sense, ‘a tear is an intellectual thing,’ as Blake puts it in ‘The ...”

“... bookshop. It’s been painted on the glass by hand. It’s from the first sentence of Mason & Dixon.Thomas Pynchon was born on Long Island, New York in 1937. He studied engineering, physics and, later, English literature, at Cornell University, then worked as a technical writer for Boeing until 1962. Not long after that, he more or less disappeared from ...”

“... and the 1933 Supplement. In ‘deleting’ these items (‘dropping’ might be nearer the mark), was Burchfield banishing words that had earned a rightful place in the OED or was he simply removing ones that had never merited inclusion? We get an idea of what he thought he was doing from his description of the 1933 Supplement as a ‘riffraff ...”

“... Missouri or the faded and layered signage against a brick background of Pentimento, Galena Avenue, Dixon, Illinois, the front of the ‘Lewis’ Restaurant, Main Street, Fairmount, Indiana or the Lincoln Triplex Cinema, North Arlington, New Jersey. The light is very particular in these small-town landscapes, gathered in the book Hometowns. The book is his ...”

“... a handful of letters to Mop, and that is because for these two years they lived together at 12 Dixon Drive, an address that would furnish the surname of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim Dixon. Was there an element of malice in Amis’s allusion? There certainly was in his portrayal of Monica Jones – full name Margaret ...”

“... At one moment in Thomas Pynchon’s novel named after them, Mason and Dixon pause to wonder what history’s verdict on their most famous work is likely to be, its ‘assessment of the Good resulting from this Line, vis-à-vis the not-so-good’. A voice, apparently coming from nowhere, says: ‘You wonder? That’s all? What about “care”? Don’t you care?’ The surveyors explain to the voice that surveying is what they do ...”

“... film, the petty criminal played by Belmondo, modelled his self-image on that of Humphrey Bogart in Mark Robson’s The Harder They Fall. These films were not even ‘classics’ – they were little-regarded films dating from the mid-Fifties, movies which Andrew Sarris, a leading historian of Hollywood, later characterised as ‘widely reviled’ and ...”

“... what protesters would do next. In one report, a Special Branch chief inspector, Conrad Hepworth Dixon, claimed that the city faced the threat of demonstrators carrying ‘ball-bearings, fireworks, hat pins and banner poles for use as weapons’. Ministers considered deploying the army. Senior police officers assured the government they were in control, but ...”

“... the carefree and the caring may not be Utopian, but it’s full of Blair’s millenarian ardour: Mark Rodol, managing director of the Ministry of Sound, calls the phenomenon ‘the biggest collaboration of young people since the Sixties’. ‘Tony Blair’s speech brought tears to my eyes,’ whimpered Noel Gallagher, from the rock-hard Oasis, after ...”

“... first encounters Reagan playing right guard in a high-school football game in Dixon, Illinois. It is a brief thing – the future leader’s wet sleeve brushes his hand – but ‘Morris’ still manages, aged 14, to register Reagan’s exact height and weight, his ‘shallow chest’, ‘adolescent coarseness’, myopia (‘I sensed that ...”

“... episodes elsewhere in his work, could suggest epilepsy. But rather than consider these fits a mark of the devil, the standard interpretation at the time, Dante takes them as a sign of ‘a predestination decreed by a supreme power’. He had been chosen. Various details in the Vita nova contribute to a false impression of his social ...”

“... and powerful indicator of authoritarian behaviour’.Sale was influenced by the work of Norman Dixon, a psychologist and the author of On the Psychology of Military Incompetence (1976), which argued that the British army recruited its officers from a narrow social demographic, undervaluing intellectual efforts and overvaluing tradition. Promotion favoured ...”

“... the international Communist conspiracy. It could be argued, against Rogin, that these three phases mark quite distinct institutional and psychological structures in American experience, just as a more optimistic account of the history of the United States would insist upon a counter-tradition of democratic openness and tolerance. But in a series of powerful ...”

“... present is as maniacal as Pynchon in the past: The Crying of Lot 49 is as outlandish as Mason & Dixon. Miller is entitled to switch anything he likes; they’re his novels and he can romp it up in ruffs or sober it up in jeans, as he prefers. But the question of why he does it is an interesting one. Miller is loquacious on the theme of historical ...”