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“... of life.’ Barker’s precocity was impressive, and attracted the attention and patronage of John Middleton Murry, T.S. Eliot and Edwin Muir. Murry gave the 19-year-old poet two books to review for the Adelphi on the strength of some pages of diary (later worked up into the first novel) and Barker had published in New Verse, Criterion and the Listener at ...”

“... and annoyed to be asked to write the official biography. It was largely due to his brother John, the art historian who became director of the Victoria & Albert Museum, that Pope-Hennessy was persuaded to take the commission. Royalty, John argued, was ‘an endangered species’ and this was an opportunity to examine ...”

“... Hitchin’, was qualified. ‘Heaven: Evenings and Weekends Only’ was closer to the truth. The major employer, the Spirella corset factory, could provide work for only a fraction of the intrepid experimentalists of the new life. A total rupture was a chimera. Places are fluid and ambiguous. They keep on changing. They are forced into fresh roles. Their ...”

“... fighting to get back my little joke, or whatever you might call it – it is more like a sergeant-major barking out at the audience: ‘laugh.’ I was allowed this paltry little thing back, and it did make the only laugh in the show. The point of this anecdote, may I tiresomely explain, is that the whole thing had become alarmingly more serious than we had ...”

“... from so many provenances – English, American, French and German – that his book will be a major resource for fellow historians for a long time. He makes an important remark about the relation between his evidence and his conclusions at the outset of Education of the Senses: ‘The search for documentation, the construction of causal patterns, the ...”

“... the obligation of men to perform their political covenants. And it was there that the Levellers John Wildman and Maximilian Petty mounted the fundamental challenge to the constitution that would be rewarded by the abolition of monarchy and the House of Lords two years later. Even the sophisticated qualifications of modern scholarship, which have dwelled on ...”

“... wore bowler hats and most men wore stiff collars; women did not wear trousers. London was still a major centre of manufacturing and its docks were at the heart of global trade networks. People who lived in the inner city were generally poor, and they got richer as you went further out into the green and pleasant suburbs. All of this changed over the following ...”

“... of the village idiot. Brecht admired Lorre’s tadpoleish looks and he was soon directing him in major roles. He starred, for example, in Mann ist Mann at the same time as he was filming M. His first substantial Brechtian role was in a controversial play written by Brecht’s protégée Marieluise Fleisser called Pioniere in Ingolstadt. The play’s main ...”

“... were named after him and he was the recipient of mandatory encomia on official occasions. John Lewis Gaddis’s biography is a tombstone-sized tribute, based on unlimited access to its subject and his papers. Not bad for a mid-level policy planner whose most senior diplomatic postings were a brief ambassadorial appointment to Belgrade and an even ...”

“... water for practical and aesthetic effect and the rearrangement of awkward existing elements, even major ones like roads, were his established techniques for rendering the surroundings of a country house picturesque. The object of the interventions was to create an apparently natural, flowing landscape, one which, however artificially engineered, nevertheless ...”

“... of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, and myriad small islands off their coasts. The late John Roberts, himself a pioneering exponent of world history, acknowledged some of these complexities in his editorial preface to the New Oxford History of England, the even more multi-volume successor, still in progress, to the original and influential ...”

“... Ian Fleming called him the ‘most formidable spy in history’; other admirers included John le Carré, Tom Clancy and General MacArthur. Owen Matthews – whose new biography of Sorge is the fifth to appear in English – is well qualified to write this book: his Ukrainian maternal grandfather was Boris Bibikov, a factory worker in Kharkov who ...”

“... Not Browning: but its author had read ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came’. Both are by John Leicester Warren, Lord de Tabley. Not that he doesn’t write well, but the well-made poem is not what Eliot and Pound made of Tennyson and Browning. What is most individual in the anthology is that which lies outside the orbit of the great names: James ...”

“... was over, and therefore of little concern. Fatefully, as Gurminder Bhambra and John Holmwood show, this was also the way many non-European peoples were seen: as relics to be overhauled or replaced.The hundred-year period that began around 1870 also witnessed the birth and growth of sociology, the discipline most preoccupied with ...”

“... political activity and lobbying, but was a bad speaker, a reserved, cautious, taciturn man who, John Aubrey noted, ‘had not a generall acquaintance’. He lived in meagre lodgings in central London, and appears to have had a close friendship with Prince Rupert which, according to an early Marvell editor, Thomas Cooke, meant that when it was unsafe for him ...”