“... and the effects fused in a single cokey quale. That’s the thing about intoxicants: because they alter the consciousness that assays them, they blur the boundaries between primary and secondary qualities, between essences and attributes. In the late 1970s the London hard drug market was yet to register the full impact of globalisation. The so-called British ...”

“... the success couldn’t last. In 1968 the New England Journal of Medicine published a letter from Robert Ho Man Kwok of the US National Biomedical Research Foundation. ‘For several years since I have been in this country,’ he wrote, ‘I have experienced a strange syndrome whenever I have eaten out in a Chinese restaurant.’ Fifteen minutes or so after ...”

“... Charles Dickens, Henry James, Bram Stoker, Ulysses S. Grant, Toulouse-Lautrec, Lillie Langtry, Robert Mitchum and Jean Cocteau were also on the books. Some of their accounts are closed, crossed out with lines of red ink and marked ‘Dead’. Grand Duke Sergei of Russia’s reads ‘Assassinated’. A ‘Sundry Debtors’ list from 1909-41 fills a hundred ...”

“... again.At a particularly stormy meeting of Tory backbenchers after Kwarteng’s tax-cutting budget, Robert Halfon accused Truss to her face of ‘trashing the last ten years of blue-collar conservatism’ by allowing her chancellor to scrap the top rate of tax and the cap on bankers’ bonuses. This missed the point. Cameron-Osborne were never blue-collar ...”

“... he found it extremely difficult to take a strong stand against British and French views ‘since, alter all, the British and French would be Finished as first-rate powers it they didn’t somehow manage to check Nasser’. Others arose from his assessment of political realities so near to a Presidential election. Lucas traces the zigs and of America’s ...”

“... in the pictures; the accompanying text is workmanlike, informative and plain. ‘Children may not alter,’ say the authors, ‘but their expectations may do so,’ and, no doubt, by the early Victorian period, knowing young readers were looking askance at the nursery homilies tolerated by the previous generation, and demanding to be amused: at any rate, the ...”

“... back into critical fashion. Isobel Armstrong’s Victorian Poetry represents a massive attempt to alter the balance. The break between the Victorians and the Modernists, Armstrong contends, is largely an illusion, a fiction constructed by the later writers in order to ‘repress’ the anxieties aroused in them by the work of their predecessors. The ...”

“... of civil society, the value of public opinion and law-bound government, and their desire to alter, if not abolish, absolutism in church and state – the Enlightenment as described by historians such as Cassirer, Gay, Daniel Mornet, Franco Venturi, Robert Darnton, John Marshall (and myself) – dissolves in Israel’s ...”

“... which encompasses, among other things, the American Civil War, Wuthering Heights, Richard III and Robert Browning’s ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’.Singularities was written on the heels of My Emily Dickinson. I picked it up soon after it was published, accustomed by then to what was broadly, and belligerently, in the air at the ...”

“... strong influence at this crisis: she imagined him in the dock, defying the authorities rather like Robert Emmet, and she said she would never speak to him again if he fled the country. She was a famous patriotic poet (she published under the name ‘Speranza’) and was closely associated with the Fenian Movement. In 1882, Wilde told a lecture audience in San ...”

“... fear of stimulating anti-semitism turned Leo Frank into a gentile Yankee businessman. But Robert Rossen, the young Jewish Communist who adapted the story for the screen, didn’t forget what he saw as his own betrayal of the Jews. A decade later, directing the first Hollywood Jewish/black buddy film, Body and Soul, Rossen made the last shot of They ...”

“... consider a more sophisticated version of the Robinson technique. Ian Hamilton, noted biographer of Robert Lowell, writes to J.D. Salinger and informs him that he has become Hamilton’s latest subject: would the notoriously reclusive novelist mind answering some questions, could he take a visit? Hamilton doesn’t expect an answer; nor does he want one, since ...”

“... his rented room has been posted as Rainbird, an inspired, totem-like alias that he embraces as an alter ego. After all, truly to travel is to seek a change in identity. Now he is no longer drifting along an indeterminate line. Bad Land both starts and ends in Seattle, where six years ago Raban’s own wandering came to rest in a new life. In other words, his ...”

“... for the rest of his long life – he died only a decade ago at the age of 99) and felt obliged to alter his story, undermining his own first impressions. Two reasons why the doubts persisted were that no one could believe that Mallory, let alone Irvine, the weaker climber, could have managed the difficult Second Step (a 40m barrier to the route to the summit ...”

“... Secret service memoirs are invariably rubbished. When Robert Anderson’s Lighter Side of My Official Life appeared in 1910 – Anderson had headed a counter-Fenian agency – Winston Churchill lambasted it in the House of Commons for its ‘gross boastfulness’: ‘It is written, if I may say so, in the style of “How Bill Adams Won the Battle of Waterloo” ...”