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“... of syntax and the personification of abstract ideas (another of Wordsworth’s special hates). Robert Mack, properly enough, sets out to be Gray’s advocate and though not all his vindications of individual poems are persuasive, his biography does add an important consideration to our understanding of Gray’s poetic values, and therefore of his high ...”

“... George Buchanan’s over-the-top ‘Elegy for Jean Calvin’. The volume remains high in some of Robert Fergusson’s sophistic-performative street-talk, Burns’s on-off, rip-roaring ‘Tam o’Shanter’, MacDiarmid’s last trump blawing ‘tootle-ootle-oo’, Edwin Morgan’s Loch Ness Monstering ‘Splgraw fok fok splgrafhatchgabrlgabrl fok ...”

“... In Scotland, however, and mainly thanks to the enthusiasm and industry of Douglas Mack, modern editions of two of Hogg’s novels, The Three Perils of Man and The Brownie of Bodsbeck, have been published in the fairly recent past, together with various selections of his poems and of the shorter fictions he contributed to Blackwood’s and ...”

“... Wilson tells a funny anecdote about Mussolini that was new to me, though I had just finished Denis Mack Smith’s Mussolini. It runs: ‘Mussolini had in fact modelled his style of dress on that of his favourite film stars, Laurel and Hardy, whose sartorial distinctiveness he regarded as the embodiment of trans-Atlantic chic. He only abandoned it when he was ...”

“... Columbia Records released King of the Delta Blues Singers – a collection of tracks by Robert Johnson – in 1961, it was the first time in decades that more than a handful of people had access to more than a handful of songs by any country bluesman. Bob Dylan got an acetate from his producer, John Hammond, and played it for his mentor, Dave Van ...”

“... starring as Rafe Ashton in his former wife Hilda Doolittle’s novel Bid Me to Live (1960), and as Robert Cunningham in D.H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod (1922), he may have had the misfortune to furnish the model for Sir Clifford Chatterley. Aldington’s maledictory novel, Death of a Hero, has not worn well. The parents of George, the ‘hero’, are parodic ...”

“... Robert Stone​ was the feral child of American literature. He arrived in the world with no one to explain or defend him, except his mother, Gladys. About her we know only stray bits of personal history. The chief evidence that Stone’s father existed is the fact of Stone himself. All other claims – that he was a railroad detective, was a Greek or a Jew, had been killed by a bomb in Shanghai in 1937, even that his given name was Homer – are hearsay, most of them floated by Gladys one day, taken back the next ...”

“... ruling house. This much needs to be said in defence of a series of kings whose reputation Denis Mack Smith’s recent Italy and its Monarchy* has left in tatters. However ‘insulated’, Steinberg’s conspirators well knew how to operate within the guidelines of Italy’s mainstream culture. They knew that ‘the best tactic available’ was ‘to do ...”

“... Towards​ the end of his time at Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios, Charlie Chaplin began to direct as well as star in the short slapstick films that were the company’s staple product. The crucial event in one of these films, The New Janitor, which was released in September 1914, is the pressing of an electric button ...”

“... of language games, some rude mirth. In culinary terms, the book is neither tofuburger nor Big Mack, but a Chinese banquet, a multiplicity of short narratives and prose fragments at which we are invited, not to take our fill, but to snack as freely or as meagrely as we please on a wide variety of small portions of sharply flavoured delicacies, mixing and ...”

“... what of Pope himself, and his Scriblerian confederates? Why, Rousseau demands, are Ehrenpreis and Mack so reticent about the ‘frequently homoerotic correspondence’ between Pope and Swift? What of Gay, ‘who never married and whose psychological attachment to the older, if occasionally paternal, Pope merits more attention than it has received?’ Not for ...”

“... whether they want to or not, and the connection is eerily alive in Frank Sinatra’s version of ‘Mack the Knife’, where he sings of making an offer you can’t refuse. There is almost too much to unravel here. The song comes from (the English translation of) Brecht’s re-creation of Gay’s play, and has been separately sung by, among others, Lotte ...”

“... missionaries, to which Parliament responded in 1868 by authorising a punitive expedition. General Robert Napier raised 13,000 troops, 20,000 logistic personnel, many thousands of mules and camels and 44 elephants in India, and shipped them to the Red Sea. After marching 780 miles overland to Tewodros’s capital, he defeated the imperial army (with the loss ...”

“... for a few hundred feet? How do you explain the Romanian-German Hermann Oberth, and the American Robert Goddard, who pursued the mad ambition of space with rockets that lifted themselves only a few yards, before collapsing under their own contradictions? Even more remarkable are the interlinked stories of the two men who actually took humans into ...”

“... impossible pace, rushing back and forth, herky-jerky, as in a speeded-up old slapstick comedy – Mack Sennett in blackface, Show Boat aground. Satire and brass can bring down any construct, especially if it’s as friable as the idea of minstrelsy.The Ellingtonians have thoroughly denuded the famous song. The bass-baritone Noble Negro is now just another ...”