“... first ones to have sex’ – to which his ex-wife Ann Birstein responded: ‘Talk about self-made men’), and it was through his reviews that he was able to respond to the shifts in the fates of that generation. When the Menshevik New Leader began to support the McCarthyist crusade in the early 1950s, Kazin announced that he would no longer ...”

“... a political grouping nor a social stratum, the mass denoted a pathological orientation of the self. Arendt claimed that its members had no interests, no concern for their ‘wellbeing’ or survival, no beliefs, community or identity. What they had was an anxiety brought on by loneliness, ‘the experience of not belonging to the world’, and a desire to ...”

“... Spender, Auden and Day-Lewis), a composite creature marked by its blend of glib Marxism, shameless self-advertising and large quantities of indifferent verse. As the popular label for the period suggests, Auden was from the start the dominating presence, and poetically he increasingly came to be seen as being in a class of his own. MacNeice was, in ...”

“... freedom to invent. This isn’t done because of a shortage of real-world material, let alone from self-importance – it’s an investigation into the instability of genre and the shifting nature of literary truth. That’s the excuse, anyway. For a while in the 1980s it looked as if Philip Roth would never recover from this syndrome, this affliction of the ...”

“... their views, especially when it might be read as a declaration of faith. I always cringe at the self-importance of the genre: though open letters can sometimes exert influence, stiffly worded exhortations hardly suffice to stop states, militaries, bombs. And yet, a ‘no open letters’ policy can serve as a convenient excuse when one is hesitant to stand ...”

“... insists on the laws of make-believe, on the fictionality of fiction, on its intertextuality, its self-referential ploys, on all the games and gimmicks taken so seriously by university wits. Davies takes them playfully, and indeed with dazzling skill, but his playfulness somewhat coldly deconstructs those notions to which sentimental old-timers (ARRO ...”

“... having one-fourth or more Indian blood’.) In his Destruction of the Californian Indians Robert Heizer reckons that between 1850 and 1863 some ten thousand Indians were indentured (made slaves, that is) or sold. In 1971 Heizer and Alan Almquist published three pages of Slave records from the Eureka courthouse in Humboldt county, Northern ...”

“... flamboyant John Elliotson’, ‘the one-eyed, gold-waistcoated, civic-skewering Robert Knox’, ‘the humane mad-doctor John Conolly’, ‘the bombastic Ernst Haeckel’. If Desmond gave us time to think about it, one might wonder whether ‘civic-skewering’ is a branch of anatomy (Knox was Burke and Hare’s main customer) or of social ...”

“... Recent years have also seen two outstanding single-country studies of the 19th-century duel: Robert Nye’s Masculinity and Male Codes of Honour in Modern France nicely complements Ute Frevert’s Ehrenmänner (‘Men of Honour’) of 1991, a book that is close in subject-matter – although not in interpretation – to the one reviewed here. The duel ...”

“... the Frankfurt refugees retreated into ‘deeper isolation’; they suffered from ‘intellectual self-doubt, escapism and élitism’. ‘A lack of interest on the part of the Institute’s core group in becoming integrated’ explains their ‘shattered lives’, writes Krohn, alluding to the subtitle of Adorno’s Minima Moralia. Even The Authoritarian ...”

“... Convention of 1907. Francis Younghusband was more or less born into the Great Game. His uncle was Robert Shaw, British Political Agent in Yarkand; his father was John Younghusband, Inspector-General of Police in the Punjab, and occasional lecturer on the Russian menace. At school at Clifton, his great friend was Henry Newbolt (‘The sand of the desert is ...”

“... of a long sequence of visitors, seeking some authenticity or purity not to be found elsewhere. Robert Flaherty’s film Man of Aran (1932) was a ‘decisive moment in the formulation of the Aran myth’, and the writings of Aran natives like Liam O’Flaherty and the Irish-language poet, the late Mairtin O’Diereain, have added further nuances and ...”

“... cultivating men of letters, he met and greatly irritated Siegfried Sassoon and Wilde’s friend Robert Ross. On Armistice Day he was to be seen in a tail-coat in a Rolls-Royce belonging to an epicene Chilean opium addict, a pretty example of feasting with panthers. Six years of dangerous living in the theatre were capped by the succès de scandale of The ...”

“... these Protestant politicians, including Walsingham and the Queen’s favourite of favourites, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, pulled off a small victory on the domestic front. They took the Queen off to East Anglia on a progress, where they stage-managed a local political revolution which threw out of office the leading Catholics of the region and ...”

“... and with the sharpest eye in the business for the tricks of the capitalists. The publication of Robert Gildea’s recent book, which successfully weaves the strands of scientific, cultural and economic developments into a political and military narrative, and of Gerald Newman’s unfamiliar case for the growth of an English nationalist culture from ...”