“... audiences. To say nothing of pretty-boys Cary Grant and Leslie Howard. Kanfer doesn’t by any means dismiss the argument, but he isn’t sure that loss of American virility due to an increase in women’s rights is a sufficient answer to the question of why there is no more Bogart. The full answer, he believes, requires a look at Hollywood’s ...”

“... attacks, she responded that the term was ‘painfully accurate’, and mounted a defence of David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo, as if the prescriptive Englishman posed the already canonised Americans a grave threat. ‘We cannot be all the writers all the time,’ she wrote. ‘We can only be who we are … Writers do not write what they want, they ...”

“... just like Dr Richard Kimble, the honourable, though much more reluctantly engaged fugitive. David Janssen The series ran to 120 episodes, and was on US television from 1963 to 1967. The finale had the highest ratings of any TV show until the answer to the question of who shot JR was revealed (can anyone now remember?). In 1993 The Fugitive was made ...”

“... such as the Webbs. Tawney opposed the Webbs’ proposals for a national minimum wage. ‘It means that people are not paid what they are worth,’ he argued, ‘but what is necessary to keep them working.’ Tawney rose to public prominence in 1919 when he defended the rights of miners at the Royal Commission on the Coal Industry. His ...”

“... of such a state on managerial-centralist lines, which he hadn’t foreseen or intended as the means to conquer the ‘five giants’ described in his report: ‘Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness’.During 1942 Churchill’s position sometimes seemed precarious, as two years of relentless defeat culminated in the fall of Singapore in February ...”

“... required that the actual source of motive power be obscured. Fressoz acknowledges his debt to David Edgerton, who argued in The Shock of the Old (2006) that we do not understand modernity because of our fixation on innovation and our lack of interest in the way systems of production operate. Accounts of contemporary reality organised around technological ...”

“... the last twenty years. Labour was well ahead of the Conservatives in the polls. The Tory leader, David Cameron, was in a difficult phase, no longer a fresh figure after a year and a half in charge, and facing growing internal opposition to his liberalisation strategy. Brown, long regarded at Westminster and by the media as a ruthless operator, was widely ...”

“... an electrician at the huge naval dockyard, remembered him [Hore-Belisha] at the 1935 hustings’ means ‘The only person we could find who remembered anything of Hore-Belisha [and it turns out not to be much] was one Ron Lemin.’ More serious is the use of ‘later’: ‘Later he [Foot] wrote of the show trials: “How deeply the left craved to give the ...”

“... as ‘a bohemian rebellion against established society which came to prominence about 1956’; David Ignatow’s poetic idiom as ‘Brooklynese speech’. But at least it doesn’t pretend to be more than it is – a ‘companion’, not a history. I wish I could say the same for the season’s lot of general surveys, which look so authoritative to the ...”

“... and time. But tabling the world in that way, and enjoying its benefits, involves standardised means of representation, and these standards had to be invented, fought for and secured. The standardisation of the world, like its ‘disenchantment’, is a much misunderstood business. No intellectual passions are stronger than those involved in achieving ...”

“... essay Wolfgang Kemp gives special attention to the highly controversial frame that Caspar David Friedrich designed for his Cross in the Mountains. It consists of a gothic arch composed of palm fronds, and a predella decorated with wheat, a vine and a diagrammatic eye. In 1808 Friedrich exhibited the painting in this frame in his studio before sending ...”

“... speech on the evening of 21 July. The chorus of praise for the Mansion House speech was by no means confined to the Conservatives: the Daily Chronicle and Daily News both responded with enthusiastic leaders. Lloyd George had pulled off a political coup. Had he also started to acquire an enduring understanding that Britain would have to go to ...”

“... and sacrifice, by further infusions of Soviet subsidy, and by all-encompassing, though by no means exclusively repressive, systems of social control. But this was never a system which could achieve self-sufficiency in food, let alone adapt and innovate enough to keep Cuba abreast of developments in the outside world. It was not a system, therefore, which ...”

“... well, well, what do we have here?’ But where, really is the fun in that? For one thing, it means that the victim of the plant knows everything. He is not compelled to wonder which of his colleagues and brothers is the fink or the nark. For another – and call me an old sentimentalist if you will – it runs the slight risk of offending the ...”

“... King reports here, is the only surviving 18th-century African artefact associated with slavery. David Dabydeen has pointed out that the very word ‘patron’ could at this point mean both connoisseur and slave-owner. It would be intriguing to know whether the peculiar interest which Sloane had in tobacco and its paraphernalia was connected with his other ...”