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“... music always returns. The outside world now mainly sees Protestant Belfast in terms of Ian Paisley Snr, a man who believes that bridges are built primarily to let the Devil in. But the bridges of Morrison’s music have connected Hyndford Street outwards to a strange semi-mystical realm of angels, children and (ultimately) the Calvinist Nirvana of ...”

“... In 1972 the final issue of Ian Hamilton’s Review was given over to a symposium on ‘The State of Poetry’. Only fifteen years on, it has the flavour of a yellowed historical document. The symposium’s tone is embattled: it finds enemies and traitors on every bookshelf, with the whole future of English poetry threatened by sinister forces ...”

“... well share something with earlier singers of the unhomely and uncanny, from Thomas De Quincey to Ian Curtis. His Earth, like theirs, is a purgatory where anything can happen and no one can leave: ‘My brother is hanging from the branches/Hanging or swimming/Our T-shirts absolutely blaze.’ He entitled his second book Flies because they thrive on dead ...”

“... figure that he has if he were not immediately and locally real to the audience as he stands in black in the king’s presence chamber. After that moment he can be or become anything the reader or viewer fancies. Timon of Athens, on the other hand, seems to have been present only as an idea to Shakespeare from the very beginning, with the result that he ...”

“... and a coffee-coloured Britain. Tolerance does not require that every Englishman should have a black man for his neighbour or that every Asian should forget his cultural identity. Instead we must acknowledge and understand the existence of social pluralism. It is not surprising that the Times’s Englishman turns out not to include Asians or blacks. What ...”

“... There is, throughout these essays, an interest in symbolic occasions. Three black convicts come out to sweep the Alabama street where a group of Civil Rights demonstrators is standing. A girl in Professor Adorno’s classroom in Frankfurt takes off all her clothes as he discourses on the dangers of spontaneity. Lee Harvey Oswald is ...”

“... Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel,* which Michael McKeon energetically bids to transcend, gave us, whatever else, the clear image and serviceable concept: ‘formal realism’, the growth of ‘the middle class’, secularised Protestant Man proudly bearing the standard of an aggressive ‘individualism’ – on Crusoe’s hard-won island as in the socioeconomic landscape of contemporary England ...”

“... interweaves the public and the private. In contrast with these two short biographies, Conrad Black has produced a magnum opus. The detail is often revealing, yet the book would surely have gained from tighter editing and, in contrast to Renshaw’s volume, the wood sometimes gets lost in the trees. Like all students of Roosevelt, ...”

“... by a narrating ‘I’ and a talking horse who paraphrases Heidegger. To find Dorn, the Black Mountaineer and poet of the American Dream Post-Modernised, honouring Davie, Larkin’s one-time ally and fellow Movementeer, a native of Barnsley who retired to Devon, is puzzling only if one doesn’t acknowledge the range of Davie’s work. Since most ...”

“... an undercover psychological warfare unit working closely with MI6, Wallace was put in charge of black propaganda operations. These consisted in feeding a host of alarmist stories about the IRA to the British press – wading through them, one begins to wonder, glumly, how far one can trust anything the British press writes about Ireland. In 1972 Harold ...”

“... independence.Such nonsense! It’s still humiliating that anyone accepted that bedtime story. As Ian Patel writes in We’re Here because You Were There, decolonisation ‘was from a British perspective uncontrollable, unwanted and unexpected. Direct imperial rule was dissolved largely in two currents of anti-colonial nationalism in Asia in the 1940s and in ...”

“... Hurricane Bird; Gaviota Oscura; Gaviota Monja; Oiseau Fou; Touaou. But when the keen birdwatcher Ian Fleming needed a name that sounded as ordinary as possible, he had to look no further than the title page of Bond’s great work. Why does the name of an actual ornithologist sound so right as the name of a fictional spy? Why couldn’t Fleming have used ...”

“... German film – beautiful and extravagant and fantastic, and nevertheless go against the grain.’ Ian Penman’s Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is in large part a book about dreams, and about interrupting them. Fassbinder belonged to a generation of left-wing artists, musicians and filmmakers whose aim was to shake their audience out of a slumber. You ...”

“... of Sir Derek Ezra, supreme servant and subtle bureaucrat of consensus, and that of Sir Ian MacGregor, vieux terrible of confrontation. ‘There is either too much or too little.’ Not since 1913, in fact, have the figures seemed roughly right. Coal had been ancillary, rather than essential, to Britain’s early Industrial Revolution. Demand had ...”

“... with us, above all the hymns of the Victorian and what one might call the long Edwardian age. Ian Bradley’s study is fascinating, once past a misguided Introduction, which develops a long comparison between Victorian hymns and modern soap-operas that seems to embarrass Bradley himself halfway through. He is a mine of information not only on the ...”