“... be long-forgotten practitioners of Imperial history like Charles McLean Andrews, Samuel Beer and Herbert Osgood.) A prolific writer on 20th-century politics, Draper has concentrated in his 13 previous books on events in which he was either a participant or a close observer. The books include studies of American Communism, Fidel Castro’s revolution, the ...”

“... to kill one man. Most of the book deals with the shifting battle tactics of Gough and General Sir Herbert Plumer, who commanded the Second Army, as seen from command level (a good overall map of the entire Western Front would have been a help), but there are occasional horrific glimpses of life at the slimy end: men shoulder-high in mud advancing on ...”

“... In 1967, Herbert Marcuse published a little essay entitled ‘The End of Utopia’, which now reads like a document of a long lost civilisation. Arguing against the pejorative use of the word as a synonym for the absurdly unrealisable, he held that ‘there is one valid criterion for possible realisation, namely, when the material and intellectual forces for the transformation are technically at hand although their rational application is prevented by the existing organisation of the forces of production ...”

“... almost through and through. Now, however, we have Richard Shusterman with a new view of the whole matter. He believes that Eliot is much more interesting as a philosopher than even his supporters think, and that the easy dismissals on the part of such detractors as Terry Eagleton and Christopher Norris are founded on political prejudice and uninformed ...”

“... The writers whom he valued, and who crop up most often in these letters (Shakespeare, Marlowe, Herbert, Donne, Marvell, Fielding, Coleridge, Joyce, Orwell, Dylan Thomas), had in his view found ways to resist religious conformity (religion and politics for Empson are virtually inextricable from each other). They give voice to the personal conflicts of their ...”

“... measurable distance of the end of my tether’ combines distress with elegance. Writing to Herbert Read he says: ‘I have been of late exceptionally busy and exceptionally worried, even for me.’ And writing again to his brother he says his life is such a mess that it would make him laugh, ‘if any Eliot could ever laugh’. He likes this one so ...”

“... equates white American dreamers with vanished Native Americans. In A Lost Lady young Niel Herbert observes the decline of Mrs Forrester, the grande dame of Sweet Water, Colorado and retroactively lionises her first husband, the rich old Captain Forrester, who ‘dreamed the railroads across the mountains’ and who, late in life, is portrayed as akin ...”

“... the contrast is heightened in retrospect by the fact that virtually everything the Kaiser said, no matter how risible, was recorded and preserved for posterity. One consequence is that his reputation has been shaped (as it was for contemporaries) much more by what he said than by what he did. In the third and final volume of John Röhl’s immense biography of ...”

“... of Minden, then chief secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Walpole admits it to be ‘mere matter of suspicion’, but does not hold back on the innuendo: The Irish are not farther removed from the Italians by their situation and climate, than by their manners and the integrity of their amours. The clergy, nay the very bishops of Ireland, are buxom ...”

“... fighting books, but no match for Leavis’s dismissive account of Shelley in Revaluation (1936). Herbert Read, G.Wilson Knight, Frederick Pottle and many other defenders argued that Shelley’s poetry is sustained by the coherence of its imagery, and that the work as a whole shows an extremely intelligent mind fully in touch with the philosophy and science ...”

“... a theory exploded by professional historians more than half a century ago under the influence of Herbert Butterfield. Gove’s vision of ‘our island story’ is about examining the ‘struggles of the past’ to see how they brought about ‘the liberties of the present’. Similarly, Schama wants younger generations to ‘pass on the memory of our ...”

“... of thousands of Jews to their deaths. Many of these Jews were highly skilled workers: that did not matter. A second front had just opened in the West, and able-bodied German men were kept out of the fighting in order to kill Jews: that, too, did not matter. The focus on this racial enemy was so intense that even with Soviet ...”

“... the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. The Actors’ Guild was a different matter. It won the battle for recognition, and better pay for supporting players, by persuasion in preference to force. It tried to mediate in technicians’ strikes which lost everyone time and money. Under Reagan in particular, it opposed plans for a single ...”

“... place in Prescott’s The Conquest of Mexico, perhaps recalled through a fleeting reference in Herbert Read’s The Green Child. (This philosophic fantasy, published eight years before Perelandra and three years before Out of the Silent Plant, has marked kinship with the space fictions, and it is perhaps noteworthy that Lewis’s Perelandran Lady shares ...”

“... afterwards, was surely right to tell him to come off it. Even if there were room for doubt in this matter, however, there can be no question that an ex-Colonial transplantee who happens to have done some of his growing up in an English school or ’varsity should be slow to bring forth his cosy reminiscences, and very slow to hand them over to anyone else. So ...”