“... infinitely appreciated them’. The dialogue ends with the appearance of the historian Ernest Renan, who seems to believe homosexuality is some sort of affectation, to be denied because it deprives men of the experience of heterosexual love as poetry or madness or both. ‘The pleasure of your senses,’ Renan says, ‘would be enriched and refined ...”

“... What, we may ask, is greatness anyway? Who in the West this century has shown it? Does it only flourish when nurtured by the ecstatic opiates of war? Greatness, in this context, is what people recognise as greatness: manifest success on a national rather than a purely partisan scale. Losing both wars hasn’t helped Germany’s candidates: Clemenceau eclipses both Hindenburg and Ludendorff ...”

“... a set of Eight Poems of Li-Po, dedicated hopefully (but in vain) to the silent film actress Anna May Wong, with whom he was distantly in love; and his most famous work, perhaps his only really famous work, The Rio Grande, is choral. Lloyd’s biography chronicles all this somewhat relentlessly, with frequent digressions into background information of ...”

“... on medieval Islam’s contributions to science, philosophy and art. In combating the theories of Ernest Renan and other Europeans who held that Islam was fundamentally fanatical and opposed to rational thought, 19th-century Muslim thinkers ‘essentialised Islam and Muslim identity on their own terms’ by conjuring an image of a glorious civilisation that ...”

“... rises. They asked the king to ensure that ‘all people, of whatever estate or condition they may be, may freely determine their consumption of victuals and apparel for themselves, their wives, children and servants in the manner that seems best to them for their own profit.’ The joyful consumerism continued for ...”

“... that would echo the speculation, in Les Fleurs du mal, that ‘perfumes, colours, sounds may correspond’, that fusing music and sound with colour and light would push the viewer/listener into a realm beyond thought. Baudelaire himself, like Delacroix and Madame de Staël, revered music’s ‘absence of reasoning’, an escape into pure ...”

“... in September 1931, or its navy’s assault on Shanghai in January 1932. All three answers may be correct, since the Japanese army and navy had different policies and objectives, and were fully capable of starting wars without consulting each other, and indeed of starting wars to gain advantage over each other. For other historians, the important ...”

“... Lassiter an archetype was born: the lone-wolf cowboy and gunman searching for something that he may never find (in this case, an abducted sister), middle-aged, world-weary but alert, hard and lean as whipcord, a man of few words, invincible in gunplay, and a dispenser of Solomonic justice. As portrayed first by Tom Mix, then by Randolph Scott, the Lassiter ...”

“... away of the usual equation of the agricultural with the natural life. A telling quotation from Ernest Gellner illustrates how instinctive this equation can still be: ‘Agrarian man can be compared with a natural species which can survive in the natural environment. Industrial man can be compared with an artificially produced or bred species which can no ...”

“... Joyce was a very long book indeed, and it gripped one from start to finish. I think the answer may be, partly, that a biography simply has to have a narrative, and a non-prescriptive approach tends to sap the narrative. What will constitute a ‘happening’ in the narrative, and how one happening will be represented as leading to another, must vary ...”

“... Yet that was the political game to which Healey had given the best years of his life. Auden may have made a passing allusion to ‘the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting’, but Healey had, for forty years, spent taxing days drafting the former and weary evenings attending the latter. It was the struggle to which he had devoted himself: a ...”

“... excreta, how odd that of all the available metaphors, Boris should have chosen to describe Theresa May’s efforts to improve her EU deal as ‘like polishing a turd’. Of course Powell wasn’t the first politician to draw people’s attention to the strangeness of the immigrants pouring into their cities. The locus classicus here remains chapter two of Mein ...”

“... from Graham Greene and H.G. Wells. For years, her literary standing was compromised by her ties to Ernest Hemingway in the Thirties and Forties. This has long since ceased to be the case. The Face of War, her collected war reporting, is one of the most readable accounts of conflict in the 20th century, unspoiled by convictions which would have been disastrous ...”

“... as a sort of miracle, attributable to the personalities of such men as Lucien Febvre, Braudel, Ernest Labrousse, history and the social sciences have developed in close symbiosis since 1933-45. Historians like Febvre, Braudel, Jacques Le Goff and François Furet have presided successively over the École Pratique des Hautes Études (now the École des ...”

“... and H.G. Wells, and leading news correspondents Crane met in Cuba such as Charles Michelson, Ernest McCready and Richard Harding Davis. These are rich materials but at the same time they are incomplete and sparse. Crane was not a prolific letter-writer and he left no diaries or memoir. Further confusing matters was Crane’s first biographer, Thomas ...”