“... Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. David O. Selznick praised Eisenstein’s Dreiser adaptation, but said that its critique of American society ‘cannot possibly offer anything but a most miserable two hours to millions of happy-minded young Americans’. ‘Let’s try new things by all means,’ Selznick wrote, ‘but let’s keep these gambles within the ...”

“... The Hobbit appeared in the Times Literary Supplement. The Hobbit was, the anonymous reviewer said, ‘a children’s book only in the sense that the first of many readings can be undertaken in the nursery’. It was to be compared to Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories, as belonging to ‘a very small class of books which have nothing in common save that ...”

“... rode out to do battle with bureaucracy, nepotism and sloth. A.H. Layard had ‘often heard it said’, he told the Commons, ‘why does not the Government allow some great firm to contract for carrying on the war? This question, however ludicrous it may appear, is based upon a very good common-sense view of the war.’ Two great contractors, Paxton and ...”

“... teaching officers were without a college fellowship. So the former secretary of the Cabinet, Edward Bridges, was invited to examine what could be done. True to form, the colleges turned down his main, and the university his secondary, recommendation. Commensality means a lot to Brooke. Cambridge should be a community of scholars not a nine-to-five ...”

“... about treating America, one of their own, nearly as shamefully, for ideological purposes, as, in Edward Said’s brilliant dissections, they have treated the Orient. ‘America’ is their inevitable metaphor for ‘modernity’ in opposition to a metaphoric past called ‘Europe’, and just about anything at all can be ...”

“... Their ideology, however, is a cultural version of it. Until recently, as the Barbadan poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite says, West Indians ‘have been unable to afford the luxury of mythology’. Colonial history offers merely divisive images which can only provoke nostalgia, remorse, shame or rancour. Hence many West Indian writers have sought to re-align ...”

“... contemporaries. Lord Hugh Cecil remarked in his popular book Conservatism of 1912: ‘It may be said that many men are brought to support the Conservative rather than any other political party, because they believe its policy on foreign and colonial matters are wise and patriotic. Nay, those principles have done more than secure widespread support for the ...”

“... do. But it is also because it is not precisely clear how any of these issues can realistically be said to be continuous throughout Britain’s recent history. Entrepreneurial failure is a very different thing in the 1980s from what it was a century before, and the social structure, however defective it might be to its critics, is not the same as it was a ...”

“... on Monday morning. The consultant’s fee was reasonable: £30. ‘No problem,’ the patient said. In effect, this £30 paid for a private latchkey into hospital. If in other respects his history had been similar to mine he would, by the use of this latchkey, have cut out three to four weeks of waiting around and getting weak. But, from the moment of ...”

“... he never accepted the validity of a single system of thought or belief – so much the better. He said himself that he wrote poems ‘not because it is smart to be a poet but because I enjoy it, as one enjoys swimming or swearing, and also because it is my road to freedom and knowledge’. The usual précis of his career is that, after a dazzling start, the ...”

“... in his serial working but is ‘beginning to see that there is something after all to be said for that method, even if in the end it works back to old tonic & dominant!’ There is, of course, a big difference between a 12-note row and a 12-note tune: the former is rarely also the latter, and Walton’s conflation of them is not without a clodhopping ...”

“... who together with the young historian Arnold Toynbee was responsible for the dossier submitted to Edward Grey, was a Gladstonian Liberal with an interest in the Armenians – and a contempt for Turkish rule – which stretched back forty years. Bryce and Toynbee’s research (see extracts on page 19) exemplified a crucial stage in the evolution of Western ...”

“... the police with a donos, or remain silent and risk more people dying? ‘I would tell them,’ he said, after a moment’s thought. ‘But I would hate myself for doing so.’America, as I realised soon after arriving there as a budding Sovietologist in the Cold War, is different. Telling the authorities about another citizen’s wrongdoing becomes an ipso ...”

“... verity: “Gentlemen, mom is a jerk.” ’ And he was not alone in his views. The psychiatrist Edward Strecker, for example, elaborated on the horrors of ‘momism’ in his 1946 book Their Mothers’ Sons, and then, ten years later, in Their Mothers’ Daughters. Like Wylie, he thought that mom’s most horrifying attribute was her ability to thwart the ...”

“... his dreams, that the pioneering work of Krafft-Ebing was published and, nearer home, that Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis were calling for sexual liberation. Ellis was a close friend of Arthur Symons, a key contributor to the Savoy, had gone on a pilgrimage to Paris to meet Verlaine, the emblematic Decadent and, like Beardsley, publicly asserted ...”