“... New York, as he did Berlin. His autobiography had appeared two years before, celebrated by Edmund Wilson in the New Yorker, who compared Grosz’s new Cape Cod paintings to Dürer. German museums were starting to reacquire his older works. But Grosz was already in the midst of his slow American suicide. ‘I’m a poor wretch, that’s the simple exact ...”

“... his assisting in his mother’s school; his marriage to his high-school sweetheart, Elinor White; their ten-year stay on a New Hampshire farm given to Frost by his grandfather; the early deaths of two of their six children; the brief two-and-a-half year escape to England, where Frost’s first book, A Boy’s Will (reviewed enthusiastically by ...”

“... tweets. Devotees of Wicca also call themselves witches. In fiction and legend, witches can be white or black, good or bad: they can be heroines and healers or hexing hags. What strange classification can bracket such diversity, from nursery tales to the blackest crimes? Roald Dahl offers a clue in The Witches, where he suggests that real witches don’t ...”

“... his name: this happiness is what finally convinces us that he truly didn’t miss all that White Russian money, gone up to heaven like vapour. Gradually he becomes famous, and is persecuted with so many questions about nymphets and Freud that some essential openness closes, the openness you see in the early letters to ...”

“... in the austere Gallimard uniform, bearing a red publicity band with the single name MALRAUX in white capital letters. An undiscovered novel? Far from it. This was a compilation of writings by Napoleon Bonaparte that Malraux had made almost anonymously in 1930, and published as Vie de Napoléon par lui-même. The publishers obviously felt that ...”

“... French general whose attention was ‘chiefly attracted’, as he later reported, by the enormous white reticule embroidered with ‘a fat poodle in gold’ that Victoria carried on her first official visit to his country, was not likely to mistake her for the Empress Eugénie. Though Munich argues, reasonably enough, that Victoria’s dowdiness did not mean ...”

“... modernised the English of the original, and carries the same series of charming black and white reproductions of illuminations from the magnificent Bibliothèque Nationale manuscript of the Livre. It also carries the enthusiastic foreword to the 1904 edition by the then president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, which has an interest for ...”

“... first place. The Lion’s Head was gone, but there was still the Beatrice Inn, still Thomas’s White Horse Tavern, still the beautiful red Village Cigars. And there were still a few of the older solitary women you don’t see much on the street anymore, with dyed black hair, eccentric hats and furtive eyes and the garish smear of lipstick that marks the ...”

“... life: it dealt a ‘decisive blow … to the unhurried “gentlemanly” style of business’, as Edmund de Rothschild put it. Warburg himself later claimed that he disliked the whole episode and would have preferred a friendly deal. But there can be no doubt that the rapid increase of the bank’s business dated from the moment he showed he was able to take ...”

“... himself. There are times when his tirades against his East India Company employers bring to mind Edmund Burke’s later, rather more eloquent assaults on the same institution, which also take a smack at the sexual crimes of the colonialists. Rather as Burke was both Irish outsider and champion of English tradition, so Cleland was similarly self-divided. He ...”

“... culture according to a linguistic model, as a system of differences and oppositions (black/white, left/right, raw/cooked, whatever) to which individuals are subject, briefly represented a fashionable alternative in the 1960s, despite the anguished warning of one Communist intellectual that the theory would cause despair among the Renault workers at ...”

“... both Freudian and contemporary, by the space it opened up for his own long struggle with reality. Edmund Wilson catches the mood in a passage from The Shores of Light: One couldn’t help being exhilarated at the sudden unexpected collapse of that stupid gigantic fraud. It gave us a new sense of freedom . . . a new sense of power to find ourselves still ...”

“... sort’, but ‘with much to contend with: among other things a terrific wife with a large head of white hair and tortoiseshell spectacles, who appears to be the worst scandalmonger in the county’. James regularly visited Herefordshire to stay with Gwendolen McBryde, an eccentric widow who ran a stud farm. She had married a close friend from his ...”

“... There was a huge increase in the potential cultural market, brought about by the growth of the white-collar lower-middle class and by advances in the disposable income and amount of leisure time enjoyed by most sections of the community. By the Twenties, for example, a gramophone could be bought for about four pounds, which may have represented a week’s ...”

“... be vulgar. One Tower of Giotto is sublime; a row of Towers of Giotto would be only like a row of white posts. The poetry of art is in beholding the single tower; the poetry of nature in seeing the single tree; the poetry of love in following the single woman; the poetry of religion in worshipping the single star. And so, in the same pensive lucidity, I find ...”