“... subjects might as well have stuck their heads through a hole in a pre-painted background. But as John Brewer emphasises in his catalogue essay, the Tour was more socially mixed than it might appear. Basset, the biggest spender among the consigners to the Westmorland, was not an aristocrat but the beneficiary of a recent family fortune made from Cornish ...”

“... Brecht’s work in its setting (sacrilege can come later), the starting-point still has to be John Willett’s The New Sobriety 1917-33: Art and Politics in the Weimar Period.1 This marvellously illustrated book takes us through all the bitter political and cultural history, from the aborted revolt of the returning soldiers in 1918, the killing of ...”

“... later, Cromwell became Lord Protector. Under the Instrument of Government, devised mostly by John Lambert, his mercurial but talented associate, he ruled until his death in September 1658, assisted by a Council of State, in theory chosen by Parliament but in practice chosen by Cromwell himself from among his friends and relations and army comrades. This ...”

“... the photographs and, above all, in the index, which, for instance, suggests discreetly that both John McCain and Barack Obama indulged in adulterous liaisons with Lupe Vélez, the most fiery of Johnny Weissmuller’s five wives. The conceit is that the index was compiled before the lawyers looked at the manuscript, and remains unrevised after their ...”

“... charity. She was determined they must not carry the family name and consequently they became the Williams sisters. Illegitimacy was an infringement of the social and racial order, indeed an attack on it. It raised the question of who was entitled to belong and in what ways. When Allan, aged six, arrived in Scotland, he became Allan ...”

“... and memorably responding to, wave after wave of neo-Marxist theory. As major influences, Sartre, Williams, Lukacs, Goldmann, Anderson, Althusser, Macherey, Benjamin, Derrida and the feminist movement have followed one another in quick succession.’ Literary theory, in this view, has become a self-contained preserve for intellectuals who talk to each other ...”

“... brittle. She was mocking, brash, hoity-toity. What she never was, in her films, was silent. John Ford admired her ‘strange, sharp face’ which made Tennessee Williams think of ‘a medieval saint in a Gothic cathedral’. Her voice has been described as ‘nasal’, ‘metallic’, and by one biographer as ‘a ...”

“... extreme optimism Godwin expressed in Political Justice (1793) and the profound pessimism of Caleb Williams (1794). And he did not share in the enthusiasm for war expressed on all sides as England embarked on hostilities in an attempt to root out the bases of contagious terror across the Channel. ‘Alas! half the actions of our lives are ...”

“... suffered grievously from their detractors, but far worse from their worshippers. The awful Jane St John, who married Shelley’s son and established for her dead father-in-law a ghastly shrine at Bascombe, solved the ‘Claire problem’ by writing her out of the record. This almost permanent friend, sister and companion of Shelley and Mary during their eight ...”

“... linked him between the wars with G.M. Young, Baldwin, Kipling, Arthur Bryant, Helen Waddell, John Buchan and Vaughan Williams, who together form a cultural unity which needs discussion. During the second war, the same qualities made his Social History (1944) as much an expression of the wartime thirst for other worlds ...”

“... took him on their list (induced in the first place – let credit be given where it’s due – by John Press). He insists, and he has the right to insist, that he is as authentic a voice of modern Britain as Philip Larkin is. As some pages of Poetry and Metamorphosis make clear, the Britain that Tomlinson speaks for is one that most of us, gratefully or ...”

“... it still Connecticut, the dear deer, the steady lay, the unprivate walls?’ His correspondent, John Hohnsbeen, an art-dealer friend, was having an affair with the architect Philip Johnson, and the ‘unprivate walls’ are those of Johnson’s famous Glass House. Schuyler was 28 and this was his first serious mental breakdown. He had only recently arrived ...”

“... by life in small groups and communities.’ In spite of the scepticism of their betters – John Locke thought that ‘a middle-aged plough-man’ could ‘scarce ever be brought to the carriage … of a gentleman, though his body be as well proportioned, and his joints as supple’ – it’s clear to anyone who’s read the words of the ‘lesser ...”

“... war that followed Angola’s independence from Portugal in 1975. In almost every case, as Susan Williams explains in White Malice, the US, attended by the former colonial powers, fought hard to influence the turn of events; before long, as Natalia Telepneva shows in Cold War Liberation, her account of decolonisation in Portuguese Africa, Moscow and Beijing ...”

“... led to Thorpe’s disgrace and departure, and then to a bitter contest for the succession with John Pardoe, gave David Steel an almost impossible task. He was 39, but looked younger, a slight figure with an easy smile, a son of the Scottish manse, neither obviously at home with scholars, like Grimond, or in London society, like Thorpe. ‘The boy ...”