“... critical assassins: Carl Weber (‘a boorish vulgarian’), Robert Gittings (‘unscrupulous’), Richard Purdy (‘incapable of psychological insight into sexual matters’) and Michael Millgate (‘prim’), the devoted Hardy scholars who have given us studies of the work, an edition of the letters and several biographies. In an argument never explicitly ...”

“... utter the profound Post-Modern truth that ‘Politics is showbiz for ugly people.’ Yes, you too may be a mediocre, flaky-scalped, pudgy sycophant. But, with the right ‘skills’, you also can possess a cellular phone and keep a limo on call and ‘take meetings’ and issue terse directives like ‘I want this yesterday, understand.’ Unfortunately, the ...”

“... Centennial Park, he was hired at the minimum wage. The bomb fragments found at his home, however, may only have been payment in kind, souvenirs of the explosion rather than evidence pointing to its perpetrator. In this privately-sponsored Olympic Games that wore the face of American nationalism, did the global Olympic village have an enemy guarding its gates ...”

“... uselessness as soon as the war started was curious, but Danchev withholds judgment. Others may not feel so well disposed. A chill wind blew over Liddell Hart’s reputation again just after the war, when he had recovered his spirits and, through the happy chance of a close relative being in charge of a nearby prisoner-of-war camp, had become acquainted ...”

“... Michael Roberts’s New Signatures (February 1932), which included contributions from Julian Bell, Richard Eberhart, William Empson, Cecil Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, William Plomer and Lehmann himself. Through Spender he met Christopher Isherwood. The friendship with Spender from the very first seemed edgy, uncertain and uneasy, but durable for all ...”

“... when gay sex was a crime. Yet the novel suggests that the legalisation of homosexuality in 1967 may not have been such a watershed after all: the law doesn’t protect Will from getting beaten up by a gang of skinheads for being a ‘fuckin’ poof’ and, worse, a ‘fuckin’ nigger-fucker’; one of his friends is arrested for soliciting by a policeman ...”

“... private conversations over oil and gas deals in Eurasia. Or both. You never know with Baker, who may be representing his law firm, Baker Botts, which represents Halliburton; or Baker Hughes, the oil services company that was promised the second tier of oil-field restoration contracts in Iraq after Halliburton’s engineering and construction subsidiary ...”

“... reinterpretation whenever the hive challenged conventional wisdom. An early 17th-century expert, Richard Remnant, contended that beekeepers could use their knowledge of queen bees to control women. Butler was forced to accept the existence of the queen but frothed: ‘Let no nimble-tongued sophisters gather a false conclusion from these true premises.’ In ...”

“... against the quiet obscurity that satisfied Emily Dickinson, her near contemporary. She married Richard Stoddard, a fervent would-be poet who was never to falter in his support of her aspirations, moved to New York, and cultivated bookish acquaintances. Money was always short, largely because she spent more than she earned. Much of her writing was directed ...”

“... in the interpretation of Duchamp, away from The Large Glass as the centre of his oeuvre (though it may shift back at the PMA where The Large Glass is a fixture). Indeed, both the exhibition and the catalogue are preoccupied with ‘his direct and deep engagement … with the inherently conservative institution of the museum’, above all MoMA and the ...”

“... we are all about to be nuked, and the next, we go back to arguing about Jeremy Corbyn. Theresa May’s surprise announcement of a snap election – surprising only because she’d spent the last nine months telling us it wasn’t going to happen – immediately wiped North Korea from the headlines, and returned the spotlight to another, more drawn-out ...”

“... girlfriend, a poor but pretty ballad-seller, is being violently interrupted by an older woman who may be his wife, and who, if we believe the account of the picture by Hogarth’s friend Jean André Rouquet, is also pregnant. The two women are rivals in politics as well as in love, the younger selling pro-Hanoverian papers, the older Jacobite ones. Apart from ...”

“... attitudes have persisted. Confronted in 1989 with the bicentennial of the French Revolution, we may still feel inclined to see that event through the complacent, uncomprehending and too easily condemning eyes of a Sidney Carton or a Scarlet Pimpernel. And this is deeply unfair. Yet traditional British distance from – and distaste for – the French ...”

“... like the Casement diaries, or even those jottings about payment to sailors in Paris which Housman may or may not have left among his surviving writings. Leaves of Grass, especially the ‘Calamus’ section, may be as easy to interpret now as The Shropshire Lad, but neither gives us any ...”

“... and music patron Baron Gottfried van Swieten, the guardian angel of Mozart’s late style. Richard Taruskin accuses Stravinsky of lying about the original idea of The Rite of Spring, which was visual and frankly ‘Scriabinistic’ rather than purely musical. In various autobiographical statements Stravinsky dismissed the help of Nicholas Roerich in ...”