“... a tale of battlefield heroism and deathbed stoicism that helped the myth of Sidney to become more powerful than the man had ever been. The funeral procession in London, arranged at the crippling expense of his father-in-law Sir Francis Walsingham, Secretary of State to Queen Elizabeth, and preserved in the public imagination by ...”

“... inevitability, the second-rate quality of American government remains surprising and is all the more irritating for that reason. Who can accept that the richest of all nations should be governed by such unimpressive men? Who can understand how successive Presidents of the United States, supposedly the most powerful men in the world, should be uniformly ...”

“... English, in fact, that he will object that his mother is Australian.) He simply makes it a more interesting condition than others succeed in doing, or else he escapes its limitations altogether. So many of the ways one thinks of him are paradoxical. In an adaptation of his own phrase (from ‘Sugar Daddy’) he is a ‘passionate clown’. He is ...”

“... bought one three-thousandth of a week before the draw, which is about three and a half minutes. A more sophisticated calculation takes age into account, in which case a 75-year-old needs to buy a ticket 24 seconds before the lottery is drawn, but a 16-year-old could risk buying one an hour and ten minutes before. It is an amusing calculation, but as an ...”

“... of swine were nearing maturity, and life was going to be a whole lot different and a hell of a lot more ominous for anyone who believed in the guarantees of the Constitution of the United States. I remembered that crazy night in Washington a few days ago, right after I heard that Magic had to leave the Lakers because he tested positive for the HIV virus. The ...”

“... books mixed therein’; no book was to go outside except to the master’s lodge, and then no more than ten at a time. To keep Magdalene honest, Trinity was requested to inspect the library annually, and to be ready to pounce.A hundred years went by. The Bibliotheca Pepysiana (still at Magdalene) became known chiefly for its trove of 17th-century ...”

“... people. He is one of those German authors who are a little in love with the English, more particularly a certain kind of young Englishman of the upper classes, with his good temper and considerateness, his easy good manners and what Thomas Mann called his ‘boyhaft’ good looks. This affection, rarely ...”

“... cultural activities in Catalonia, so that art, architecture and the Catalan language had become more powerful weapons in politics than resentment about Madrid’s handling of foreign or economic policy. The architects who worked on the new apartment blocks and public buildings in Barcelona between 1880 and 1910 began to play with a dual mandate, not merely ...”

“... Schumann turned to chamber music; and in 1843, to the oratorio, with a setting of sections from Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh, under the title of Das Paradies und die Peri. After this there was a hiatus, caused partly by a bout of severe depression, and partly by the emergence of a new style; and it was not until 1847 that Schumann managed to concentrate on ...”

“... Leaming, who attributes every quote. As it is, we must take Brady on trust, an act of faith made more uncomfortable by his habit of quelling controversy by starting sentences with ‘Actually ...’ But Brady’s larger canvas at least enables him to give even more weight – some two hundred pages – to Welles’s career ...”

“... about it is all but unknowable. In the temperate zones, where the waxing and waning of the year is more noticeable than in the tropics and more gradual than near the poles, summer and winter solstices were often marked with what archaeologists like to muffle under the blanket term of ‘ritual’, but what that means, even ...”

“... In the English versions, the Muirs pretty faithfully followed the Brod line – which was more or less to see Kafka as a modern Bunyan. Like all interpretations of Kafka, this one has a good deal of truth in it. One cannot read a page of Kafka without feeling that there is a strong religious sensibility at work, allied to the kind of violent honesty ...”

“... oppression.’ He was describing in his oblique way what Anatole France a century later described more brutally as ‘the majestic even-handedness of the law, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.’ France’s English contemporary Lord Justice Mathew made the point in ...”

“... writes in her exhaustive biography; at the time of his death in 1970 no one in his cohort was more revered. Yet today he is largely forgotten, which is one indication of how much the terms of art have changed. Was he eclipsed by the many artists he influenced, and are they now eclipsed in turn?Born in 1905 in a tenement on the Lower East Side, Barney (as ...”

“... Romantic revolutionary, and his prison is not a camp but a stone vault. You wouldn’t think that more than a hundred years had passed since Fidelio. But as the names Dachau or Buchenwald began to appear more widely in the literature of the Thirties, it was clear that they referred to a new phenomenon – not to traditional ...”