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“... Duchamp, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Albert and Juliette Gleizes, Henri Lefebvre and, later, Richard Wright. They bought paintings (Renoir, Picasso, Degas); travelled to Egypt and the Caribbean; in New York they knew Ralph Ellison, Truman Capote, Alfred Kazin, John Cheever, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Robert Penn Warren, Eleanor Clark.When Hazzard met ...”

“... In fact she identified with her: ‘She’s been hurt. She knows the score … I don’t read the gossip stuff. That’s what comes out of her movies. She’s someone who was abused. I could identify with her. I never could identify with any other white movie star. They were always white people doing white things.’ (White people doing white things ...”

“... no chance of seeing; the house adverts by the subversive estate agent Roy Brooks that my brother read aloud (‘The décor is revolting … rain drips sadly onto the oilcloth … sacrifice £3500’). As Jeremy Lewis observes, it was a remarkably handsome newspaper, much more spacious in its page layouts and crisper in its black/white contrasts than its ...”

“... of Vietnam Syndrome. His ‘theory of the Cold War’ was ‘We win, they lose,’ as he told Richard Allen, who became his first national security adviser. Allen liked the idea but knew it would be heresy to a foreign policy establishment that believed in peaceful co-existence. Yet times had changed: what was a reactionary fringe position in 1964 ...”

“... me to Marxism than in repelling me from it. I was – I admit it – impressed. And now I read, in Ignatieff’s book, that it was an annihilatingly hostile letter from Berlin to the Vice-Chancellor of Sussex University which ‘put paid to Deutscher’s chances’. The fox is crafty, we know, and the hedgehog is a spiky customer, and Ignatieff ...”

“... Melville had been Grumbach’s literary god, alongside Poe and Jack London, ever since he’d read Pierre, or The Ambiguities as a teenager. He ‘made the war’ with his new name, and by the time it was over so many people knew him as Melville that there was no question of going back to Grumbach. Even Melville found himself getting confused: ‘I forget ...”

“... in 1907 converted to Lutheranism; he doesn’t seem to have taken his baptism very seriously. Well-read in contemporary Hungarian and Western literature and immensely ambitious to contribute to literary and cultural history in the footsteps of Wilhelm Dilthey, the young man was active in a circle around Endre Ady, the greatest Hungarian poet of the ...”

“... actually did. There are, of course, other books with pictures of his work; and this book is best read with at least one of those at hand. Rawsthorn’s emphasis on realms other than the visual is certainly right for this complex story. It’s mildly annoying, however, when her fashion summations are too pat and moralistic, and it’s a little more so when ...”

“... of the non-combatant Lawrence to complain while thousands of his compatriots fell in France. But Richard Aldington felt that Lawrence never recovered from the banning of The Rainbow, and Kinkead-Weekes follows him by placing this event at the centre of his narrative. The judge ruled that there was ‘no justification whatever for the perpetration of such a ...”

“... with literary education that he can offer only purely negative reasons why anyone should want to read or teach Shakespeare: the Right do it so the Left must do it too. Unfortunately this rationale may be a shaky one given that some sections of the Right are starting to attack literary education as giving the lower orders ideas above their station. Political ...”

“... dated) contorted with guilt and indignation over the romantic delusions of Occidentalism. Having read The Race Gallery I feel retrospective embarrassment at my own ignorance. It was meant only as counterfactual musing. But some readers must have known that there already are commentators given to fulmination about pigmental challenge and the inherent defects ...”

“... Independence that broke out in 1919, as later nationalist piety would insist. It is startling to read, in Charles Townshend’s fine study, The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) leader, John O’Leary who, in Yeats’s poem, shared his grave with the corpse of ‘romantic Ireland’, observing that the ...”

“... In​ August and September 1990, Richard Sale, a lieutenant colonel from the Light Infantry regiment of the British army, toured the UK and West Germany – then just months away from reunification – with a primitive Zenith Supersport laptop. Sale had commanded a company, some 120 men, in Northern Ireland in the early 1980s and later a battalion of 650 ...”

“... from sleeping with his sister-in-law to leaving slices of bacon between the pages of the books he read at breakfast. Return to Yesterday, first published in 1931, is a memoir of literary life in England in the Late Victorian and Edwardian eras. It begins in 1891, with Ford immersed in Kipling’s ‘Only a Subaltern’, on a train in Sussex; and ends at a ...”

“... and then into an internationally recognised and traded commodity. Camembert is a gripping read, and if it winds up using cheese as a perspicuous site for understanding the making of modernity, well, there are lots of other cheese books which really are just about cheese. If you’re going to make a coherent case that an authentic local product has ...”