“... process of national formation begun during the 1948 War of Independence. Far from being a war of self-defence, the 1967 campaign, as seen by the Right, liberated the national patrimony and secured the true historical boundaries of the Jewish state. At the same time, a messianic nationalist movement emerged out of the traditionally moderate Zionist Party. The ...”

“... to a different past, the one presided over by Gloriana rediviva; and the Queen’s own strenuous self-propaganda in the last years of her reign, unconvincing in her lifetime, became all too potent once she was dead. Ironically, the adulation was encouraged in part by James himself. Fulke Greville, whose Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney paradoxically extolled ...”

“... of someone like Jérôme Lindon, founding editor at Editions de Minuit, Girodias comes across as a self-serving hustler and Trocchi as his willing pimp. It is unclear what makes Trocchi’s story worth telling in the first place. He was a bit-player with a very large ego, and basically irrelevant to anything that might pass for understanding ‘post-war ...”

“... to a Post-Modernist obsession with the status of dehumidifiers as art objects, or with the self-reflexivity of the visitor’s gaze (literally enacted, if you want, with the help of a few mirrors). It can take on board the traditional museum connoisseur too, giving new life to the old debates about (in the case of the British Museum) what colour to ...”

“... signalled his intentions to his far-flung sublunar creatures. No need for poets then to ask, with Robert Frost, whether design governed in so small a thing as a royal bastard’s rebellion or a reflagged Kuwaiti oil ship. In fact, neither Lilly nor Ashmole would have needed to wonder whether such seemingly minor events might escalate into large and then ...”

“... the tongue; and the delight in exact verbal repetition, so puzzling to many modern readers and so self – evident to anyone who shares in the liturgical tradition of either Judaism or Christianity. ‘The need to utter’ reminds us that what matters in the Bible is not to convey a ‘message’ – as though the Bible were a book of dogmas or a handbook of ...”

“... Swedish documents), Dame Veronica’s account of the war was scarcely challenged for a generation. Robert Ergang’s The Myth of the All-Destructive Fury of the Thirty Years’ War (1956) concentrated on the exaggerated accounts of its economic consequences. S.H. Steinberg’s The ‘Thirty Years’ War ‘and the Conflict for European Hegemony (1967), a ...”

“... of English artists and intellectuals. Her great-uncle was the painter Rudolph Lehmann, friend of Robert Browning and George Eliot. Her father, R.C. Lehmann, was a well-known writer and man of letters. Of her siblings, a younger sister is Beatrix Lehmann, the actress, her younger brother John Lehmann, poet, and fructifying editor and founder of the London ...”

“... and mercenary kind) constitute ‘what is right’. Among the essays, one on ‘Homosexuality in Robert Duncan’s Poetry’ makes the same point. The appeal to experience, and alleged vindication by experience, are what Gay Liberation, when it is respectable, is all about; and Gunn’s fearlessness about it, together with his ardent belief that the ...”

“... friends. The letters haven’t much to say about these books, except for a very good one to Robert Trevelyan about Where angels fear to tread. Mostly, the letters are home thoughts from abroad, weekly reports from some frontier of feeling Forster had either crossed or backed off from. You wouldn’t learn from the letters what it meant for him to fall ...”

“... prohibitions. The climate of life is hostile and punitive. Competitiveness, orderliness, self-control, gravity – these are Puritan values that became part of his being. There can be no doubt that Newton’s unusual personality contributed a great deal to his way of life and perhaps to his scientific assumptions. Manuel has brought this before us ...”

“... there is some melancholy comment on the hazards of upper-middle-class life, made entirely without self-pity. Indeed, forged in that cruel fire, the stepsons emerge with a remarkable sense of purpose and humanity. It would be presumptuous to ask whether the price was too great. Farewell Sidonia also recounts a child’s life, that of a Gypsy child found ...”

“... Pell’s remarkable portrait, painted by the American artist in 1890, depicts an independent, self-contained and far from lustful woman. The performance Vision of Salome by the Canadian dancer Maud Allan shocked audiences in music halls throughout Europe a decade later with its ‘feminist and subversive’ mood. Much closer to the current Viennese ...”

“... it were to be wished of all wise men and Her Majesty’s good subjects,’ he wrote to Robert Dudley, ‘that one of these two queens of the isle of Britain were transformed into the shape of a man, to make so happy a marriage, as thereby there might be a unity of the whole isle.’ Portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots by François Clouet ...”

“... inventive descriptions of her own life, she delivered exhaustive accounts of novels such as Robert Hichens’s Bella Donna, Eden Philpott’s The Secret Woman and W.B. Maxwell’s The Guarded Flame. These fictions featured buccaneers with bull-like necks, Nubian singers and baskets of snakes, ‘intensely masculine’ counts and women with flower-like ...”