“... memories, and cast them in epic form (Arthur Scargill’s first job, when he joined the Barnsley Young Communist League, was to be made ‘Ballads and Blues’ secretary). Aneurin Bevan, a glittering representative of the South Wales coalfield, and the most accomplished orator of his day, made the mining industry a vivid presence in the world of high ...”

“... steps with perfect rhythm and grace. ‘Where, when and how,’ the narrator asks, ‘had this young countess, educated by an émigrée French governess, imbibed from the Russian air she breathed that spirit, and obtained that manner which the pas de châle, one would have supposed, had long ago effaced?’ Anisya and the other peasants in the room are ...”

“... and scandal, Maintenant was entirely written and published by Cravan: the other contributors (Robert Miradique, W. Cooper, E. Lajeunesse, Marie Lowitska etc) are all pseudonyms. Even the advertisements bear his skewed imprint: the restaurant Chez Jourdain entices customers with the words, ‘Where can you see Van Dongen’ – the Flemish painter Kees van ...”

“... a necklace, the Heart of the Ocean, that went down with the ship but found instead a sketch of a young woman wearing it. She contacts the expedition’s leader and tells him that she is that woman. Today for between $549.99 and $799.99 (on eBay) you can buy a reproduction of the fictional necklace made soon after the film came out; or you can buy a ...”

“... the novelist, Joan Acocella speaks with some reverence of Cath-er’s ‘Duse revelation’: the young writer’s precocious verdict, having seen both actresses perform onstage in the 1890s, that Duse was the superior artist because of the classical restraint she invariably brought to her roles. Bernhardt ‘expressed’ tragic emotion, Cather wrote in a ...”

“... had awarded him a grant). In fact, Schwartz vacillated over his book’s merits. He told Robert Hivnor that he was ‘in the middle of what will probably be the longest and worst poem in American literature’ and wrote to R.P. Blackmur that he was ‘publishing a blunder 261 pages long’. But to Berryman he confessed: ‘Every time I read or see ...”

“... a skier, climber, trail walker. These activities took precedence, when he was a schoolboy and young student, over academic work. At the age of 15, in 1945, he completed the ascent of Mount St Helens: ‘Step by step, breath by breath – no rush, no pain.’ The newspaper he read when he came down from the hike, on 13 August, was a day-old copy of the ...”

“... in economic policy of historic proportions.In the 1970s Krugman belonged to a generation of young lions at MIT, then the pre-eminent economics department in the US. The prevailing model at MIT was the so-called neoclassical synthesis, shaped since the 1940s by Paul Samuelson above all. Working from a broad acceptance of Keynesian prescriptions for ...”

“... ally? Paradoxically, this very inversion has led to unpredictable opposition. It was Congressman Robert Dornan of California, the classic Orange Country patriot and flag-waver, who said this week that ‘American boys don’t die for emirs.’ Those who harbour more general reservations are thrown back on irony. Not only did King Hussein seem like ‘one of ...”

“... Woolf’s metaphor comes readily to mind). The heroine of the first story is a child, a talented young actress, exiled by her talent from the companionships of childhood, tiptoeing defensively round the rumbling adult realm of intrigues and antagonisms, but coming at last into her own, her private space – and indeed her position of power – when she puts ...”

“... a distortion to prove a point. Aztec children were rarely sacrificed and only in times of drought. Young male adults were the usual victims. Of course there is something comical in the earnest lilt of the last two sentences, but the ridicule of the columnists was more sinister, a foretaste of how they will try, as the saying goes, to take out pockets of ...”

“... prizes the Oedipus complex. It would, wouldn’t it? Blake’s cultivation of his brother Robert was, apparently, ‘his most sustained and successful piece of Oedipal insubordination’, a means of ‘displacing his parents – particularly his father’. Aren’t the poems full of oppressive fathers, from Tiriel to Nobodaddy? ‘William’s poems ...”

“... are. There is a sinister patriarchal uncle, who runs the toyshop of the title. And there are two young men. One of them, Finn, explains the rules of the house: ‘He’ – the uncle – ‘likes, you know, silent women.’ Indeed, on Sundays, the sinister uncle forces his wife to wear a monstrous silver choker that he made, in case we were disinclined to ...”

“... digging up the pasts of their own living parents, most star-struck imitators of Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford would probably draw the line. The difficulty, of course, is that both Albert and Sylvia Bernstein had a secret that they desperately wanted to preserve. Some time between 1940 and 1942 – even their son cannot be specific about dates – they had ...”

“... these Protestant politicians, including Walsingham and the Queen’s favourite of favourites, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, pulled off a small victory on the domestic front. They took the Queen off to East Anglia on a progress, where they stage-managed a local political revolution which threw out of office the leading Catholics of the region and ...”