“... echo in Namier’s fascination with the collective and the irrational. Freudianism was another major influence, imbibed by way of Freud’s disciple Theodor Reik, whom Namier met in Vienna in the 1920s. Reik told him that psychoanalysis could cure his insomnia. We shouldn’t overplay the intellectual pedigree of Namier’s ideas, however. When at Balliol ...”

“... he was born in America and knew Africa only at second hand. Both Equiano and Spavens fought in major actions in 1759, Britain’s ‘year of victories’: Equiano as a powder-boy on Edward Boscawen’s flagship the Namur at the Battle of Lagos, and Spavens as a topman on the frigate Vengeance at Quiberon Bay. Equiano later sailed to the Arctic with the ...”

“... in an interview. This doesn’t apply to his paintings of the 1930s, except perhaps to his other major landscape, Larchant of 1939, an exercise in restrained pictorial geometry designed to give eloquence to the church tower set in the middle distance but just breaking through the horizon – the tower of an ancient church, made a symbol of la France ...”

“... human cases rarely exceeds a couple of thousand. As the Oxford Textbook of Medicine says: ‘The major animal reservoirs are urban rats as well as rural rodents including ground squirrels and prairie dogs. The Oriental rat flea Xenopsylla cheopis is the most efficient vector. When bitten by a rodent flea humans become an accidental host and play no role in ...”

“... at all. For instance, the contributions of the many Scottish Whigs like Holland’s librarian John Allen, or the historian Sir James Mackintosh, who were drawn into the circle, are left unanalysed. When he writes of ‘Holland House’ thinking this or disapproving of that, he mostly seems to mean Lord and Lady Holland. The book is essentially an ...”

“... Courage in Profiles or a feminist film called The Woman Lieutenant’s Frenchman. But there are no major tumbles, and I was still laughing at the end. But is there a novel in all this? There are no characters, and no plot, no sudden reappearances of Widmerpool or horribly inappropriate reminders of Winterwade. But there is a situation which is almost ...”

“... specialises in strip-searching delinquent Mexican males, but finds true love in the arms of Big John, a massively-endowed black drug-pusher. There are riots and burning in the barrios, a fixed election, a major kidnapping, and a good old American assassination by a ‘lone crazed killer’ who keeps a picture of Jodie ...”

“... return but who had in the meantime transmuted from vivacious satirist to plodding bore. Upward’s major work, A Spiral Ascent, came out in three parts between 1962 and 1977, breaking a silence that had lasted since the early Forties, when he joined the Communist Party (he left it in 1948). The trilogy presents the saga of its artist-hero’s joining and ...”

“... cultural ascendancy was beginning. These artists – George Luks, Everett Shinn, William Glackens, John Sloan and George Bellows – had all (Bellows apart) started out in the 1890s as newspaper sketch-artists in Philadelphia. Drawn together by the magnetic preaching of Robert Henri, a slightly older painter who had returned from art school in Paris to his ...”

“... in particular the mongoloid type or Down’s syndrome, first identified at Earlswood by Dr John Langdon Down. There was, however, more to this transformation than the mere growth of administrative protocol. Long-term shifts were occurring in the philosophy of what constituted idiotism, as is outlined here in a superb essay by C.J. Goodey. Theologians ...”

“... and others merely succumbed to in ignorance, costs both human and material were being counted by John Maynard Keynes, who agonised about working for a government he despised ‘for ends I think criminal’. The war had, indeed, fast become an increasingly disreputable enterprise which with every discarded corpse raised the stakes of peace. Blinded by the ...”

“... that the long poem may be ‘nothing more than a poet’s attempt at greatness, at becoming “major” ’. While, on the one hand, Armitage asserts that ‘today, it is still the short poem that stays in the mind as language, whereas longer poems tend to be remembered for their overall structure or patterning, or for the occasional quote’, his other ...”

“... the ethnographic collection was moved into one of the wings to become part of what was now a major exposition of ‘mankind’ in all its glory from the year dot. Jawbones, flints and assorted prehistoric matter were shifted to the new museum from the Jardin des plantes to thicken up this notion of a voyage around the species. The Palais de Chaillot was ...”

“... of there. He thinks that’s very funny, as if I’m under the impression I’ve just shared some major revelation. He used to laugh at me like that in class when I was teaching. There’s a poll in a recent New York Times, buried in the middle of section A, where nearly all of the important news is to be found in the Times, usually below the fold. It ...”

“... children presumed dead and travel to Palestine on a transport designed for orphans (as recorded in Major/Minor, the memoir of Arikha’s daughter Alba). The convoy struck mines in the Black Sea: of the 1500 children who were evacuated, only 130 survived the journey.‘What is modern about him primarily is, if you wish, his anxiety,’ Robert Hughes later said ...”