“... of the Golis Mountains, Fiqi Ayuub might under other circumstances have seemed idyllic. The hills, sharp and jagged, stretched off into the distance beneath a mercilessly bright sky. One of Save the Children’s emergency health teams had already set up shop under the eaves of a long, red-roofed building, and a couple of hundred women and children were waiting ...”

“... in the Observer, he describes how, with 3188 pages of text set and proof-read, he began to feel sharp chest and stomach pains. ‘My wife was certain that I was spending too many hours crouched over my desk.’ A few weeks later, Davison had to have a sextuple heart by-pass, after which he felt that he was ‘living on borrowed time’. It all sounds rather ...”

“... politics. Prominent among them are a lengthy defence of the traditional view of the Cold War and a sharp attack on the new, more approving picture of Eisenhower.* Schlesinger and others might well take comfort from the appearance of four new books concerned with the Cold War, the Eisenhower presidency, or both. All are aimed at general, rather than scholarly ...”

“... Even now, the cover of A Brief History of Time sets a tiny, and almost literally disembodied, Stephen Hawking against a vast backdrop of the starry heavens. But already by the Sixties and Seventies a new presentation of scientific self began to circulate. James Watson radically confessed that his thoughts strayed to ‘popsies’ even while working hard ...”

“... I mention these examples from Kraus’s own linguistic and historical world – Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, in their book Wittgenstein’s Vienna, suggest that Kraus’s work is the other, ‘unwritten’ half of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus – in order to suggest both that there may be times and places where aphorisms flourish especially and that there ...”

“... cobbled and gabled ‘Tinkerbell Towne’, as Burra dubbed it, where memories of Henry James and Stephen Crane were fresh and sightings of Radclyffe Hall and her friend Una, Lady Troubridge, lent a touch of verisimilitude to the farcical Rye that, passed off as ‘Tilling’, was the abode of E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia and ‘Quaint Irene’, the ...”

“... banking steeply to avoid the pyramidal summit of the Canary Wharf tower, is named in honour of Sir Stephen Redgrave. After hacking through brambles, picking a path around Magellan Boulevard, Atlantis Avenue and a boarded-up missionary hut, I found myself outside the perimeter fence of the steel-grey block of Buhler Sortex Ltd. Two men wearing crisp blue shirts ...”

“... of its director in Life, led to an invitation to work for John Huston. He wrote an adaptation of Stephen Crane’s story ‘The Blue Hotel’, which Huston did not use but liked enough to give him another project, The African Queen. Later Agee collaborated with Charles Laughton on the screenplay of Davis Grubb’s extraordinary novel about the discovery of ...”

“... but she was a hissing goose. While her judgments may not always be acute, they are almost always sharp. Of Mary Curzon, for example: ‘The latter a very good type of decorative West End furniture – beautiful, silly, idle, and wonderfully, amazingly dull; always saying she is a fool and never minding it; never getting accustomed to her beauty, therefore ...”

“... close to the head, with tight frizzes of ginger or auburn hair showing at the edges. The face is sharp and pale, the gaze challenging, the nose prominent, the mouth small, the lips bright red. In her left hand she holds a small book – probably a prayer book. She is a very stylish widow, if not a merry one. It is no great surprise to find the soi-disant ...”

“... The Portrait of a Lady already urges us to think of Isabel Archer ‘as an Emersonian Becky Sharp’ who chooses to marry a parody of Emerson’s transcendentalist, and only then sees her error. The seed of all Poirier is in one prophetic paragraph that exalts American literary nationalism: The connection between James and Emerson is worth attention ...”

“... stupidly ever after.’ The Angry Young Men who were Delaney’s fellows and friends came out, sharp-nibbed, against that dispiriting plotline. But how to screw the girl without ending up in the new semi with the pram in the hall on the council estate at the edge of town? Women in these fictions are enticing but dangerous, knees-together honeypots ...”

“... his ability to be disconcerting and outrageous, his uneasy sexual consciousness – and his sharp eye for the failure of all socialised modes of behaviour and moral pretension. The disconcerting vitality, the touches of mystery, the bawdry, edginess and common sense are all imitated by Pilkington, as well as recorded by her. Swift is the reason the ...”

“... There are some nice bits of furniture but the atmosphere (well-heeled retired couples, women in sharp little Robin Hood hats, men in Barbours) puts me off, and having driven fifty miles to get there, I spend ten minutes looking round, then beat a quick retreat. I drive back over upper Wharfedale to Kettlewell on a road that used to be deserted and scarcely ...”

“... strands in the Labour movement. Some, such as William Adamson, Vernon Hartshorn, Thomas Shaw and Stephen Walsh, were trade union moderates; others, like Fred Jowett and John Wheatley, were socialists from the Independent Labour Party (ILP) strongholds of West Yorkshire and Clydeside. In addition, there were the Fabian intellectuals Sydney Olivier and Sidney ...”