“... pre-Reformation who nobly gave his head to forces beyond his control. Most absurdly, because of Robert Bolt’s screenplay, this barrister of Catholic repression is widely envisioned as modernity’s diapason: the clear, strong note of individual conscience, sounding against the authoritarian intolerance of the Early Modern state. Thomas More died in ...”

“... And I guess the "robin” means he stole birds.’ Robin is more likely to be a nickname for Robert, though the resonance with ‘robber’ may also count for something, and Hood may suggest his frequent disguises, for Robin is a great trickster whose masquerades inevitably bamboozle his foolish oppressors: he specialises in pretending to help people ...”

“... to most historians conclusive evidence of the Marian regime’s shortsightedness and instinct for self-destruction. Yet the case can be made that in 16th-century terms the burnings were inevitable, and that they were efficiently carried out and persuasively defended. The regime had to break the back of Protestant resistance, and pressed the device of painful ...”

“... 1945 – the Cold War standing in this case as both analogy and warning. In Return to Cold War, Robert Legvold – a specialist in post-Soviet foreign policy and regular contributor to Foreign Affairs – sees worrying similarities between the current situation and the early stages of the Cold War (c.1948-53), focusing in particular on the rhetorical ...”

“... plans for a new show set in an alternative reality, in which the Confederate South, led by General Robert E. Lee, has successfully seceded from the Union. D.B. Weiss, one of the producers of Confederate, explained the thinking behind the series: ‘What would the world have looked like if Lee had sacked DC, if the South had won – that just always fascinated ...”

“... of the rapport between Blair and Clinton and the genuineness of Blair’s populism, penchant for self-made multimillionaires, and pleasure in throwing parties at Downing Street for pop stars. I ask a question, ‘Whatever happened to Labour’s commitment to the principle of progressive income tax?’ to which Ross replies that he doesn’t know ...”

“... Anatomy of Bibliomania, a comprehensive treatment of obsessive book-buying in the manner of Robert Burton; and sometimes even a copy of Carter and Pollard’s Inquiry into the Nature of Certain 19th-Century Pamphlets, the exposé that dished Thomas J. Wise, forger of rare editions. It all seemed to contradict the rants of intellectuals about the ...”

“... hoarding flies, reducing his handsome accommodations to a warehouse, caring only to measure his self-contentment by the quantity of his acquisitions, was surely crazy. To remain indifferent to the interests or opinions of others, except when to consult them might mean an increase to his store, the encroaching measure of his own greatness: to live thus was ...”

“... Autobiography of Alice B. as a crucial document in the history of Modernist fashioning and self-fashioning – the story of Axel’s tower or Babel’s, told in the first person. It should also make us think yet again about the legacy of cultural Modernism – and about its relationship to the larger fate of Europe in mid-century. The Man from ...”

“... Geller had given him a mind-expanding reading list of what we would now recognise as New Age self-help books. Elvis had read them all, performed all the meditations, but didn’t feel the light, not in mind, body or soul. The fire refused to descend; his spiritual air remained a vacuum. Now, on the plush customised tour bus, Geller was thrown by how ...”

“... women, felt driven to sketch his extraordinary personality. Koestler himself wrote several mordant self-analyses. Scammell from time to time interjects his own ideas on what – his neglectful mother, his inner conflict over his Jewishness in anti-semitic Central Europe – made Koestler so pugnacious, so insufferably competitive, so tyrannical and ruthless ...”

“... precocity here takes a cultural form that was central to Spender’s own habitual confidence or self-importance. And the second is that, as a writer, Spender was, as he sometimes acknowledged, a constant autobiographer. In World within World, his first formal autobiography, published when he was only 42, he contrasted himself with those of his poetical ...”

“... designs or marketing. Seeking a change of publisher was less like a fresh start than a sort of self-sabotage, since it risked the new book being separated from his back catalogue, especially damaging in the case of a trilogy. The Information was published by Flamingo in 1995, but Amis was back with Cape for Night Train in 1997 and has stayed there ...”

“... was, however, an epoch of unprecedented epoch-mania. Nothing was allowed to be its own individual self; everything had to be interpreted in terms of what was typical for its time. A handful of nit-picking philosophers and pukka historians may have frowned their disapproval, but why should anyone care as long as the trade in periods and period styles was ...”

“... Dowland and Purcell, with a small debt to odd contemporaries like Kevin Ayers, Syd Barrett, Robert Wyatt.In​ Germany in the mid-1970s, Eno hung out with the Cologne experimentalists Can and collaborated with Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius (aka Cluster, aka Harmonia). Not long after Another Green World was released he was in Germany and ...”