“... afford to live in big cities like London and New York. But the world that incubated Russell, and drew out all the snaking tendrils of his offbeat eclecticism, is long gone. Lofts once inhabited by breadline artists, musicians and filmmakers are now the sole preserve of billionaires. The cross-pollination that allowed Russell to switch between different ...”

“... and gave her name to the modified milk bottle in which donated blood was stored. Another, Charles Drew, Columbia’s first African American medical graduate, built the infrastructure for plasma collection in the US for shipment to the various theatres of war. At a time when black blood was acceptable only when specifically labelled pint by pint, and was ...”

“... Mellor and Gerald Kaufman (described by Isaacs as possessing ‘toxic conceitedness’) to Chris Smith were not amused. How, people asked, was the ‘income requirement’ of the Arts Council’s most voracious client arrived at? Were the singers’ fees not excessive, did the stage crews not live the life of Riley? A succession of investigations by ...”

“... who figure in these pages in a very unfavourable light are that fun-loving clergyman, Sydney Smith, and the then unregenerate Tory, Gladstone. George Arthur, governor of Van Diemen’s Land or Tasmania from 1824, was a puritanically self-righteous person, convinced that mankind is ‘born and saturated in wickedness’ and that his wards, in ...”

“... is to show first how Spanish, French and English/British intellectuals, jurists and writers all drew on the legacy of the Roman Empire to define imperialism and to implement and legitimise it. Secondly, Pagden sets out to demonstrate that these ideologues also modified their arguments in relation to each other. Referring back to Rome – both pagan Rome and ...”

“... it.’ They remember the ‘Laon Breviary’, the set of rules for novice fugitives that they drew up while hiding together in a French chicken coop. Paragraph 12 read: ‘Emotion clouds judgment; anxiety too. It may never happen.’ Ludwig is directed to a shabby hotel, already crowded with European refugees in many stages of crazy optimism, suicidal ...”

“... under the guise of meeting a mutual friend, Aykroyd had finally agreed to Lewis’s request. She drew the line at the luxurious but rather notorious Taj Mahal, and she and Lewis stayed at a beach-side guest house. After they had made love for the first time, Aykroyd revealed that she was pregnant with Wallace’s child. ‘For a moment he did not move, then ...”

“... present. Even discounting the fact that all the accounts we have of his life, including Denis Mack Smith’s authoritative 1994 volume, tend to hagiography, it’s clear that from the earliest age Mazzini was both physically attractive and immensely charismatic. Briefly united under Napoleon, Italy was returned in 1815, at the Congress of Vienna, to a divided ...”

“... he puts it in his poem ‘Wessex Heights’. Ford reminds us that in the maps of Wessex that Hardy drew and which were first included in the 1895-96 edition of his fiction, there are no railways, despite the many appearances of trains in his work: in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, ‘modern life’ is described as stretching out its ‘steam feeler to this point ...”

“... mitches upon his face and hand as would have made any other but himself fall into despair.’ This drew from the prince ‘such hideous cries and complaints as would have rent the rocks with compassion’. Meanwhile, as Fraser enthusiastically describes, the MacDonald ladies wrestled with calico and wool to construct an outfit that would fit a strapping fellow ...”

“... exercise in dispelling illusion, penetrating the veil that bourgeois economists (chiefly Smith and Ricardo) had draped over a system that depends on the exploitation of labour for the generation of profit. If the words in his book become overly familiar they lose their revelatory power and become yet another veil that purports, paradoxically, not to ...”

“... Pound, Virgil and Sextus Propertius.’ He also introduced his girlfriend to Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, Carolee Schneemann. ‘Her eyes opened wide.’In later years, Acker often said that she had studied linguistics under Roman Jakobson. This wasn’t true, Kraus thinks: Jakobson taught at Harvard, which didn’t take girls until the mid-1970s. Acker ...”

“... the Bible.’ A Festschrift to mark what would have been his hundredth birthday in 2012 drew contributions from all the paladins of the Tory right: Roger Scruton, Andrew Roberts, Simon Heffer, Iain Duncan Smith. His stream of long, considered speeches continued to ripple through Tory minds, all the more perhaps ...”

“... contrast Reaganism and Thatcherism, both of which had been described as ‘revolutions’, and I drew the easy job of discussing the first. Reaganism, already a waning memory, was never much more than a fraud, based on a three-credit-card trick and appealing principally to hedonism and credulity. Taxes would not go up, but everybody would be better-off and ...”

“... in a line what we had seen. That seems the important thing to tell posterity. The pictures he drew of Olivier, Gielgud, Richardson and Redgrave, of Edith Evans, Peggy Ashcroft, Sybil Thorn-dike and Maggie Smith, are true likenesses. We saw them too, and he can be ...”