“... and how, may be difficult to determine. The Hetling trial made great play with this ambiguity. John Mortimer, for the defence, asked a collector who appeared as a prosecution witness, having bought several ‘Hetlings’, why he had bought them. Was it for investment and financial gain or simply because he thought they were beautiful? The collector replied ...”

“... and reward the interest of a mass readership. Direction, sometimes amounting to misdirection, is John Mullan’s topic. ‘As the title of this book suggests, Dickens’s artfulness is often an almost impudent trickery.’ To illustrate what he means by artfulness amounting to trickery, Mullan draws on a rather different scene in Oliver Twist, in which ...”

“... in the 1890s at Friedrich Wilhelm Universität in Berlin, and his short story ‘The Coming of John’ features an episode in which the protagonist is intoxicated by a performance of Lohengrin. This rapturous feeling is only shattered when a white childhood friend arrives and asks him to vacate his seat – an experience that Du Bois compared to the Veil ...”

“... a rhinestone dog-collar.’ He was responding to Auden’s admonition on reading O’Hara’s and John Ashbery’s entries for the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1955: ‘I think you (and John, too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any “surrealistic” style, namely of confusing authentic ...”

“... Welsh publishing houses and record labels sprang up, along with Welsh bands, some achieving major national and international success. There was a renewed sense of cultural confidence, even when – or especially when – the bands were critical of traditional Welsh culture and middle-class Welsh-language activists. One musician on the scene told King ...”

“... to achieve his ultimate goal. All of this is illustrated by the contribution he made to the two major ‘initiatives’ since the abolition of the Stormont parliament in 1972: first, power-sharing with an Irish dimension in 1973-4, and secondly, the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985. His interesting account of the first can be compared with those given by Brian ...”

“... memoir which prefaced Shead’s book are re-quarried. And Motion never cites references – a major irritation of this biography without bibliography. Constant’s life-story is told with gusto, nevertheless. The brilliant conversationalist and punster – a schoolboyish Wilde or down-to-earth Coleridge – is admirably evoked. We appreciate his pleasant ...”

“... or Tito (who had the nerve to talk back), it is diverting to come across individuals like Major Lukyanov of the Second Air Army, who ‘lavished infinite care’ on the construction of dummy airfields, or the dashing General Badanov, whose early success in the Donbas had later ‘quite gone to his head’. Erickson shows a nice touch, too, with the ...”

“... which we firmly believe are in the best interests of everyone.’ Yet it can be seen from John Braithwaite’s absorbing study of Corporate Crime in the Pharmaceutical Industry that Upjohn was at that very moment part of a producer’s cartel which, from 1953 to 1960, controlled the price of broad-spectrum antibiotics (particularly tetracycline). The ...”

“... of English culture, Wiener states that Dickens’s ‘fictional world led from the Old England of John Bull and stage-coaches through the feverish new urban and industrial society to end in a cathedral town among public school men’. This is preceded by a quotation from Angus Wilson on Drood which does not really help the discussion, for the point surely is ...”

“... Plays, paintings (famously Delaroche’s Execution of Lady Jane Grey), new editions of John Lingard’s revisionist History of England, as well as Pugin’s architectural manifesto Contrasts, all treated it as the determining event in national history. The facts were fiercely argued and at a popular level there was much debate about whether or not ...”

“... there were still the necessary reservations. ‘Poetry is – I fear – incurable,’ he wrote to John Murray in October 1816. ‘God help me – if I proceed in this scribbling – I shall have frittered away my mind before I am thirty, – but it is at times a relief to me.’ To fritter is to waste time, but it also means to break into fragments, a ...”

“... in studying small special points.’ These were chiefly botanical and contributed to his last major publication, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits. Published in 1881 shortly before his death, it was one of Darwin’s bestselling works, an illustration of the considerable consequences such ...”

“... that his near invisibility sustained his authority and he never sought the limelight, but as John Macnicol points out in a brief but sharp entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, for two decades his word was, almost literally, law: ‘In the interwar years no policy proposal could proceed to legislation without the actuary’s ...”

“... public scandal is infinite.’ ‘By the common consent of all London’, Byron’s close friend John Cam Hobhouse said, Caroline had ‘made a dead set at him’. By the middle of May, Byron realised that he had been reckless; their affair had got out of hand. Besides, he hated scenes, and she could not live without them. In an affectionate letter he told ...”