“... a natural choice for a top appointment. ‘Attilio and I go to Cyrenaica to govern there as Vice Roy and Vice Reine,’ Lilliana boasted to her father a few months after the wedding. The couple were promised a palace in Benghazi, ‘with our own stables, garage full of cars, our troops, our own torpedo boat’. As a colonial governor, Teruzzi was granted ...”

“... down on one knee, serenading the delighted actress who plays his mother in a voice as strong and piercing as a foghorn. It is this curious icon which inspired Rogin’s formidable book. The Jolson who starred in Hollywood’s first feature-length partial-talkie – the movie which sounded the death knell for silent cinema – is himself a ...”

“... and ‘foreign’ organisations (like Greenpeace), and minorities; though, as Arundhati Roy pointed out recently, ‘“intolerance” is the wrong word to use for the lynching, shooting, burning and mass murder of fellow human beings.’ The BJP insists on a form of Hinduism that is wholly new: it accords a deep respect to science and the ...”

“... and ‘famously misogynistic’ have followed it around. It was made into a film, with a strong cast (Harvey Keitel, Roy Scheider, Stockard Channing), but was by all accounts awful. Michaels didn’t like it much himself, as he describes in his essay ‘Kishkas’: after he saw the rough cut, ‘disgrace, like ...”

“... in standing up to communism whatever the cost, and blamed any excesses in the investigations on Roy Cohn, the lead counsel, whom Kennedy had despised from the start. ‘The truth is that the early Bobby Kennedy embraced the overheated anti-communism of the 1950s and openly disdained liberals,’ Tye concludes: ‘His job with the Republican senator from ...”

“... record his visits to grand-paternal territories. Family matters were kept within the family: strong affection, decorum, financial disaster, and at least one first-class scandal (Degas’s brother was attacked by an angry husband on the steps of the Bourse, and returned blows with revolver shots), give to the story a Trollopian sense of the fragility of ...”

“... but especially the yellow house, which faces the sea, are obliged to withstand the battering of strong winds blowing from the north-east. At the yellow house live Polly’s Aunt Mary and Aunt Frances, both too religious for their own good – a temperamental defect well understood by Jane Gardam: one is overtaken in the end by vagueness, the other by ...”

“... nationalism: ‘The discovery in mid-Meiji’ – around the turn of the 20th century – ‘of a strong affinity between Japan’s situation and that of Germany’s late modernisation led to an increasing dependence on the German example to legitimise the authoritarian heritage of the Tokugawa state while ostensibly remaining faithful to modernisation on ...”

“... old papers for proof of his family’s title. What Gouberville seems to represent is a very strong sense of community. He was not a ‘peasant’ himself, but he was attached to the land in the same emotional way that his peasantry was. The peasants were much more like him than like the descendants of their runaway relations who had managed to thrive in ...”

“... delivered the bomb over Japan. He also signed off on the plutonium device that destroyed Nagasaki. Roy Glauber, an assistant professor when I first knew him, had been the youngest member of the technical staff at Los Alamos, recruited even before he got his bachelor’s degree. His roommate Ted Hall was the second youngest staff member. Hall was also one of ...”

“... connection. In addition to the Dickens borrowings, Crafts took some lengthy passages from Rob Roy, as well as several poetic epigraphs, and brief quotations from other British writers, including Wordsworth, Byron and Monk Lewis. Robbins expands her analysis in In Search of Hannah Crafts, a collection of 23 essays on the book and its context which she has ...”

“... Whiffs of scientific evidence, such as finding that some people with multiple sclerosis make a strong immune response to measles, that cells from patients with Paget’s disease (a disorder in which bones soften and swell) contain structures resembling the component parts of measles virus, and that samples from the bowels of patients with the intestinal ...”

“... would never be enough. Once tempted, politicians would be unable to keep their hands off what Roy Jenkins called ‘a more powerful weapon against progressive legislation than anything we have known in this country since the curbing of the absolute powers of the House of Lords’. But it turned out that one referendum was exactly enough and the people’s ...”

“... of English writers – prize above thoughtfulness, and certainly above difficulty or discovery. Roy Jenkins writes nicely, but we prefer the bumbling, scabrous, impenitent confessions of a minor Tory toff. Long before Nancy’s inspired wind-up on posh lingo was published in Encounter in 1955 – and long before the idea of a ‘booklet’ on left usage ...”

“... Bell and Irving Howe argued as much some thirty years ago. In the pop art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Gay sees an abandonment of moral purpose. When Warhol declaimed that ‘everything is art, and nothing is art,’ the end seemed to have arrived. Since then, according to Gay, the noteworthy protagonists of the modern have dwindled in ...”