“... and friendship loyalties, and wholly negative. The case always cited was that of Pavlik Morozov, a Young Pioneer who denounced his own father during collectivisation, whose example was recommended to generations of Soviet children.*In the course of my research on Soviet history, I became interested in Stalin’s Cultural Revolution of the late 1920s and early ...”

“... with the ferocity of Ford’s detractors (they seem to close their eyes to watch his films), but David Thomson makes a mighty-seeming case against him in his Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema. From the 1975 edition: Ford’s male chauvinism believes in uniforms, drunken candour, fresh-faced little women (though never sexuality), a gallery of supporting ...”

“... was a kindly and familiar old man who had suffered terrible personal tragedies: the death of his young wife and infant daughter in an automobile accident in 1972; the death of his eldest son from brain cancer in 2015; the crack addiction and wastrelsy of his surviving son in the years that followed. Broadcasting a socially distanced campaign from his ...”

“... worked, and my grandparents worked before that, and where I spent a great deal of time when I was young.It was strange, being able to imagine the rooms in which Beegan had lived – or, more accurately, since I never went into a locked ward when I was a child, the corridors he walked to get from the ward to the art studio and back. I remembered those ...”

“... found it hard to decide whether he was a whimsical idealist or a provocateur. Only Minna, a young German employed there as a hostess, signed his petition urging the French government to take a stand on wildlife protection. The clientele assumed she had fallen in love with him. Morel then took to the bush and launched a vigilante campaign involving ...”

“... home from a tour of southern Italy. He spent three days arguing about art with the innkeeper’s young daughter ‘in a manner’, she wrote, ‘which opened my mind and taste for greater things’. She began to look beyond Zoffany to Joshua Reynolds and the dawning Romanticism among her contemporaries. She was sociable as well as talented, albeit somewhat ...”

“... was never dealt with directly. In three years, there was no lecture about the Famine, the Fenians, Young Ireland, the 1916 Rising. Even poor Michael Davitt and his Land League only got a look in because they represented a headache for Charles Stewart Parnell. History was Daniel O’Connell, Parnell and John Redmond, who led the Irish Parliamentary Party in ...”

“... and he opened a showroom in South Kensington to display his rugs and furniture. Rab Butler, then a young MP, and his wife, Sydney Courtauld, Samuel Courtauld’s daughter, commissioned him to design their dining room. Interior design led to a growing circle of acquaintance, including with the Australian painter Roy de Maistre. In his memoir, Patrick White ...”

“... directing our attention unswervingly to what is specific and different about this moment.’ As a young socialist organiser in Turin, Gramsci had enthusiastically supported the Bolshevik Revolution. After 1926, imprisoned by the fascists, he turned his attention to figuring out why the revolutions that almost happened across Europe in the 1910s and 1920s had ...”

“... non-SF novel, The Hospital of the Transfiguration, written in the late 1940s and depicting a young doctor’s wartime internship in a psychiatric hospital, was translated in 1988. But his earliest SF novels, Man from Mars and The Astronauts, weren’t. Lem dismissed them as mutilated by a subservience to Soviet ideology. So his career in English begins ...”

“... the judge decided treatment wouldn’t be helpful. He was sent down for 20 years. In 1613, a young German girl, Maria Ostertag of Ellwangen, came to the authorities, confessed that she was a witch and implicated 34 other people. She had copulated with Satan in horrific secret rituals – his penis, she said, was hard, cold and hurtful. She also claimed ...”

“... It was here on 10 June 1904 that James Joyce met Nora Barnacle, who worked in the hotel. The two young strangers who had locked eyes stopped to talk, and they arranged to meet four days later outside the house where Sir William Wilde, eye surgeon to the queen in Ireland, if she should have ever needed an eye surgeon (which she did not), and his mad ...”

“... records in 1898, ‘Went for a short ride up Maddingley road. Walked into old chalk pit full of young trees,’ the flash of hindsight tells us that this is the origin of a key episode in The Longest Journey; but in the moment of its happening whatever thoughts or feelings it stirred in him remain hidden. In the more revealing notebook diaries Forster ...”

“... and another penny dropped, and the portcullis rose on the first tableau, the head was back on the young queen’s shoulders, and she was ready to meet her stern tormentors once again, to pit in vain her beauty and her freshness against their heavy, grown-up authority. Sometimes, amid the protests of my nanny (‘Isn’t it a waste of money?’; ‘Isn’t ...”

“... an adaptation of Blaise Cendrars’s L’Or, and a version of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. David O. Selznick praised Eisenstein’s Dreiser adaptation, but said that its critique of American society ‘cannot possibly offer anything but a most miserable two hours to millions of happy-minded ...”