“... Fund, estimates the US subsidy at $83 billion a year. Senators Sherrod Brown (Democrat, Ohio) and David Vitter (Republican, Louisiana) have asked Congress’s investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office, to come up with a more authoritative figure. No one to my knowledge has done the equivalent calculation for the countries of continental ...”

“... forestall their [defection] or to cover their trail.’ Perhaps. Yet it was the British Communist David Crook who did most of the spying on the Orwells – and, according to Gordon Bowker in his biography of Orwell, Crook went on to suggest that Eileen was having an affair with Kopp. The snakepit from which the Orrs scrambled when they left for France was ...”

“... street names are a bizarre mélange. North of Selous the next avenue is Livingstone; then comes Herbert Chitepo, named after an African leader martyred in the struggle. To the south, Baker and Speke intrude between Samora Machel and Mugabe. Since those two famous explorers never came anywhere near the territory formerly known as Southern Rhodesia, their ...”

“... Round about four in the afternoon the thought of a cold beer would start popping up in my brain. Herbert Fingarette, the best contemporary philosopher of self-deception, has also written a book on alcoholism. Heavy Drinking: The Myth of Alcoholism as a Disease (1988) argues the opposite case to Ameisen’s. For Fingarette, the view that alcoholism is a ...”

“... poverty he saw in Wales he said ‘something must be done’ – and a prince for the Jazz Age. Herbert Farjeon’s tribute to the good-time royal bachelor, ‘I’ve danced with a man who’s danced with a girl who’s danced with the Prince of Wales,’ was one of the hits of 1927. The prince’s father’s remark that if he inherited he would ruin ...”

“... together several times, they were seen in the same way, both key figures in determining what Herbert Read called, in Horizon, ‘the fate of modern painting’. John Lehmann used their work to illustrate a volume of Penguin New Writing and Peter Watson, who co-curated the first exhibition of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, chose both of them, along ...”

“... from recent prods to produce work of greater scope. In The History Manifesto (2014), Jo Guldi and David Armitage worry that the production of scholarly miniatures disqualifies historians from contributing to urgent cultural and political discussions – about climate change, sustainable production, international governance etc – in which the longue durée ...”

“... of Surrealism during the war years (he also launched a journal there, with Duchamp, Ernst and David Hare, called VVV). And though Bretonian Surrealism was opposed to abstraction, it helped American artists like Jackson Pollock develop an automatist gesturalism that was more expressive of the unconscious than any Surrealist dreamscape. Such was also its ...”

“... by Louis XIV for French television. Triggered by an archive clip of his maternal grandfather, Herbert Morrison, another ennobled socialist cabinet minister, Mandelson launched into a memoir of cycling around Hendon, committee room to polling station, bearing leaflets, carrying messages as proudly as the freshly baked loaves in Ridley Scott’s celebrated ...”

“... read many of the same books, from the same canon of French revolutionary literature. He respected David as a painter because of his ‘revolutionary classicism’ and, in his book on The Success and Failure of Picasso, he cites Bakunin’s typically anarchist dictum that ‘the urge to destroy is also a creative urge,’ comparing it to Picasso’s ...”

“... I never smelt a smelt like that smelt smelt. Leonard (Chico), Adolph (Harpo), Julius (Groucho), Herbert (Zeppo) and Milton (Gummo): Groucho was a middle child, if you want to make anything of it. He was the first to succeed, at the age of 15, with a vestigial talent for singing, but a miasma of rotten luck trailed his early efforts. When he went on the road ...”

“... Oxford Books have been anything from six hundred pages to a thousand; Davie’s predecessor David Cecil’s Christian Verse was six hundred, while Davie runs to not more than half that. Where Cecil’s 1940 volume gave 40 pages to Browning and 14 to Coventry Patmore, in Davie both poets have sunk without trace. But such disappearances are only ...”

“... first-class people to semi-starvation.’ He had in mind the treatment of people like his father, David, who, as Bevan put it, was ‘choked to death’ by pneumoconiosis (a lung condition caused by long-term inhalation of coal dust) but received no compensation since the condition wasn’t classified as an industrial disease under the Workmen’s ...”

“... Jervis, who joined Basaglia’s team after working with the Turin publishing house Einaudi on Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilisation, set up the project that would emerge in 1968 as L’istituzione negata (‘The Negated Institution’), edited by Franco Basaglia – though it seems that Ongaro’s input was at least as substantial. This collage of ...”

“... properly’. Livingstone never skimps on the medical details. In the next sentence he notes that Herbert Morrison, the first Labour leader of London County Council, was born ‘by coincidence’ with the same condition and so lost the sight of an eye. Earlier he tells us about the removal of his grandmother’s arthritic kneecap. Later we hear about his ...”