“... penury with Trapnel is a tribute to his late friend’s remarkable effect on women; Maclaren-Ross may have lacked funds, but he was never short of adoring women. ‘People think because a novel’s invented, it isn’t true,’ Trapnel remarks at the beginning of a long monologue on the art of biography. Placed beside Paul Willetts’s oddly spiritless ...”

“... that would echo the speculation, in Les Fleurs du mal, that ‘perfumes, colours, sounds may correspond’, that fusing music and sound with colour and light would push the viewer/listener into a realm beyond thought. Baudelaire himself, like Delacroix and Madame de Staël, revered music’s ‘absence of reasoning’, an escape into pure ...”

“... of less than £2000, they proposed to pay the managing director alone £350 a year). But Cambridge may in any case have been an unwise place in which to launch a venture of this kind. The locals, it’s been suggested, were never likely to be enticed away from bathing in the Cam (and certainly not if the alternative cost two and six). Ferdinand Mount, who ...”

“... commentators felt there were simply too many books: ‘a vast Chaos and confusion’, according to Robert Burton. ‘The longest life of a man,’ John Cotgrave lamented, ‘is not sufficient to explore so much as the substance of them, which (in many) is but slender.’ Thus careful reading was figured as a kind of profitable destruction: an act of ...”

“... wages they earn, the debts they face and the opportunities their children will or won’t have. Robert Putnam’s Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis is even more closely attentive to the changes that economic and social transformation have forced on families, schools and communities.3 Putnam presents a series of case studies of parents and their ...”

“... of the blood-lettings to which Paris – described as the ‘homicidal city’ by the Norman poet Robert Blondel – was prone at this time, are shown to have been critical to the political polarisation of France into two mutually hostile zones. To speak, as Sumption does, of an ‘iron curtain’ partitioning France may be ...”

“... the veneration she received from her own. Stott acknowledges that ‘negative views abound.’ It may have been ‘a matter of no light moment’, as Roberts reverently put it, ‘to bring the memory of Hannah More fairly before the world’ in 1834, but the More of 20th-century historiography was a hate-figure in the Thatcher ...”

“... write any poems until the autumn of 1914. Thinking over their genesis afterwards, his friend Robert Frost commented that ‘the decision he made in going into the army helped him make the other decision in form.’ This is both a simple material explanation and perhaps also a piece of soul-searching. Frost knew that the more Thomas believed he could ...”

“... of insisting that their honour remained untainted. His book can be read in conjunction with Robert Moeller’s War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany, which explores these themes with imagination.* The myth of the Wehrmacht’s ‘clean hands’ took hold in these years, and – witness the heated debates over the ...”

“... private conversations over oil and gas deals in Eurasia. Or both. You never know with Baker, who may be representing his law firm, Baker Botts, which represents Halliburton; or Baker Hughes, the oil services company that was promised the second tier of oil-field restoration contracts in Iraq after Halliburton’s engineering and construction subsidiary ...”

“... in Vasari’s biography of Sebastiano, but, oddly enough, not in that of Michelangelo, and matters may not have turned out quite as Vasari describes. But there does seem to have been an estrangement between the two that lasted almost until Sebastiano’s death; in that period he painted almost nothing. Vasari explained his lack of activity by the fact that he ...”

“... attention to powerful figures such as Trevelyan and the two prime ministers of the period, Robert Peel and John Russell, he believes that no individual should be held responsible for the way the British government handled the famine. The real culprit was the imperial capitalist system. He offers a fresh interpretation of Peel’s decision to import ...”

“... under way in Britain, with contributions by Yorkshire Television, Lords Devlin and Scarman, and Robert Kee. Irish public opinion, provincial to the last, finally fell in behind its UK counterpart. What is most unexpected about the Hill and Conlon books, perhaps, is the intensity of their descriptions of prison life. Innocence ...”

“... because brashness is a necessary virtue there. He writes well, is extremely witty, and while he may or may not still be a Marxist, he certainly enjoys an opinionatedly radical cutting-edge quite sufficient to place him apart from the general run of American journalism. Moreover, he goads Americans by a scathing de haut en ...”

“... illustrators and calligraphers, is set stumbling by the weight of its clothing. The aesthete may be charmed, but readers qua readers look only for puritan neatness. Billboards and headlines catch the eye, but if you want more than a few sentences to be read you had best turn to anaesthetic greyness and deny the eye its desire to find visual amusement in ...”