“... Casa Guidi. At Rome in the winter of 1860-61 he spent most of his time in the studio of his friend William Wetmore Story, modelling clay figures, too absorbed (or depressed) even to read. In the same period he is known to have offered the ‘Roman murder story’ to a number of his friends (including Anthony Trollope and Tennyson) and the idea that he himself ...”

“... so he went in. A splendidly built young man, stripped to the waist, and with a torso of dazzling white, was standing not far from me. He was tall, handsome and serene, and was repelling with his boxing gloves a hectic assault of Ezra’s. After a final swing at the dazzling solar plexus Pound fell back upon his settee. The young man was Hemingway. Pound got ...”

“... good place not to go out from. A self-curated mausoleum of memories: photographs, toys, magazines, William Morris wallpaper, Arts and Crafts furniture; a library of Victorian and Edwardian fiction, Stevenson, Meredith, Wells, Conrad, W. Pett Ridge. Moorcock, with his sacred cats in a basket, brings up a map of London on his screen, shifting and rearranging ...”

“... ads that portrayed the tax as an attack on ‘the entire black community’: Unlike most white Americans, many African Americans who accumulated wealth did so facing race discrimination in education, employment, access to capital, and equal access to government resources. In many cases, race discrimination was supported by governmental policies and ...”

“... like Solly Zuckerman tell us how it was for them, and perceptive novelists such as Nigel Balchin, William Cooper and C.P. Snow expose much that is true in the guise of fiction. Drawing upon a variety of sources – reports of Royal Commissions, obiter dicta of scientific notables, newspaper editorials etc – Dr Gummett gives us the first ...”

“... however, that the spirit of Sturt’s early contributions to the Commonweal, the newspaper of William Morris’s Socialist League, continued to animate both the published work and the extensive private journal he kept. A reluctant entrepreneur, Sturt remained fully alive to the anomalies of his situation. He it was, he admits, who – ‘say in ...”

“... his ‘special writers’, just so as they’d have somewhere to spread their elbows in New York. William Faulkner was never out of there. Always at night. Always drunk. But one morning even Cerf got fed up with the brewery toxins in the office hum. He took back the key. Another of Cerf’s specials, Truman Capote, a young goldfish new-swimming into the ...”

“... Katherine Mansfield standing in a London garden, with a line of washing hanging behind them like a white flag of truce or surrender); Lawrence’s severed friendship with Bertrand Russell; the suppression of The Rainbow in 1915; the dim years (1916-17) in Cornwall, when the Lawrences were being investigated by government authorities as possible German ...”

“... in the prose. ‘The range and grasp of his mind is always evident in the present book,’ William Empson wrote in a review of the essay collection The Dyer’s Hand, quoted by Davenport-Hines, ‘but it strikes me that his mind is increasingly hampered, and that the resulting thoughts are often wrong ... he twitters like a curate in ...”

“... 1980s, long before many of the other groups represented at Genoa were formed. The Tute Bianche (‘white overalls’) are a more recent and distinctively Post-Modern phenomenon, committed to the deconstruction of the opposition between violence and non-violence, but they, too, have roots in the autonomist movements of the 1970s. Demonstrations of this kind ...”

“... of mad writers, Hölderlin, Nerval and Christopher Smart. The more genial and indeed congenial William Gass describes Walser more modestly: ‘He was a kind of columnist before the time of columns.’ And a further, more modest name is offered: ‘The signature “Harmless Crank”,’ Gass suggests, ‘could be appended to quite a few without discordance ...”

“... anything back, even when he is playing around with the truth, is the man whose later career in the White House overlapped with the early years of Blair’s and Howard’s premierships. Bill Clinton was the sincerest liar in modern political history, and what he, and his opponents, and the American public discovered was that the sincerity could easily trump the ...”

“... of his actions and it could be argued that a jury is better equipped than an Oxbridge-educated white male, however venerable, to make an accurate assessment of such circumstances. The Government seems to think juries are so cerebrally challenged that they constantly acquit when they should be convicting, but a Bar Council analysis of Serious Fraud Office ...”

“... venture. A diorama of Adam and Eve committing original sin leads to a room filled with black and white images of the Holocaust, atomic warfare and heroin addicts.We are used to thinking of the battle line between natural science and creationism as the one drawn at the Scopes Trial of 1925, which concerned the teaching of evolution in Tennessee public ...”

“... his paternal grandfather, was a tall, blue-eyed blond – as one historian recently put it, ‘a white man with a Hispanic name’. He took his doctorate in physics at the University of Chicago in 1936, then went to Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, where he was based for the rest of his academic career.Lawrence built cyclotrons, complex ...”