“... drunk, falls down stairs, gets sacked and never sings on the stage again, but instead enthrals the young John Major with musical evenings in their Brixton tenement. Both the cat burglar and the Jamaican have delicious girlfriends who are probably no better than they should be. The cat burglar’s girl disappeared whenever he went to jail but when he was there ...”

“... Arthur Waugh likened the work of Eliot to the Spartan custom of exhibiting a drunken slave to show young men ‘the ignominious folly’ of debauchery. (Pound replied that he would like to make an anthology of the work of drunken helots or Heliots, if he could find enough of them.) One anonymous writer, here rescued from oblivion, divined that Eliot’s aim ...”

“... a demand for massive reparation payments to black Americans. The Monroe Ride was hosted by Robert Franklin Williams. Nicknamed ‘Chairman Rob’ by his supporters, Williams was second only to the Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X as an outspoken advocate of ‘armed self-reliance’. The head of the Monroe branch of the NAACP in the 1950s, he assembled ...”

“... is no coincidence that travel writers on Central Asia – a list that would include the Etonians Robert Byron and Colin Thubron, the Marlburian Bruce Chatwin and the gentry Scot William Dalrymple – so often boast superior educations if not pedigrees. Aspects of Stewart’s response to Iraq show the influence of his earlier travels. His interest in the ...”

“... as though what’s going on out there were more interesting to her than the rigmarole in the car. Robert Siodmak, the director, told her what to do in minute detail, forcing her to play down her performance. Whoever deserves the credit, the result is a little piece of perfection, a rare instance of downbeat, off-guard grace. Gardner was never so good ...”

“... are more likely to find it in Brooklyn or Queens, and the banker’s island paradise that young people leave behind is decidedly less vital without them. Bender makes a strong claim for the role of creative intellectuals in New York’s political culture in his six central chapters. An ambitious essay on ‘Modernist Aesthetics and Urban ...”

“... or desire. There are few scenes more melancholy in 19th-century fiction, or in paintings such as Robert Braithwaite Martineau’s The Last Day in the Old Home, than the enforced sale of household goods. Thackeray made a specialism of clearance, in Vanity Fair and then again in The Newcomes; George Eliot followed suit, at length, in The Mill on the ...”

“... up in some of his later writing as frank Orientalism (‘Now I constantly see Dunja, beautiful, young, appearing in the oases, and the desert’). A happier influence on his work came from the French which was much spoken around him and whose poetry he discovered in the pages of the Mercure de France. When he left for Europe in 1912, he touched base in ...”

“... banknote falls from a man’s pocket. The camera shows Gandhi’s face on the note. A young girl picks the money up, and asks her mother what she should do with it. Her mother says she can get herself chocolate, buy a doll or give it back. The girl hands the note back to the man who dropped it. Against a background of sentimental music, a voice ...”

“... back to England. Among them were the ship’s captain, David Cheap; his second-in-command, Robert Baynes; the chief gunner, John Bulkeley; the carpenter, John Cummins; and three young midshipmen, John Byron, Alexander Campbell and Isaac Morris. They returned home in rival groups, by different routes, telling ...”

“... One was for Ferdinando Wainman, a member of the Virginia Governor’s Council; another for Robert Hunt, the church’s first minister and chaplain of the expedition that founded Jamestown. Hunt was an Anglican, naturally, given that the town was established in 1607 not just as a commercial plantation and trading post, but as a bulwark of Protestant ...”

“... book and written almost entirely at this pitch of judgment. Even its composition was heroic: a young man from the poor Jewish Brownsville section of Brooklyn, just graduated from City College, teaching courses at night and reviewing books as they came along to help pay the bills, going to the enormous reading room, Room 315, at the Fifth Avenue flagship of ...”

“... in 19th-century German universities. It had few practical uses, and at a time when all the bright young scientists in Germany were turning to hard-nosed experimental and physiological approaches, it was dismissed as a merely ‘descriptive’ discipline. But even description wasn’t easy. Source materials were scarce, hard to handle, hard or impossible to ...”

“... Robert​ Reed became president of the United Kingdom Supreme Court on 13 January 2020, succeeding Lady Hale. By the end of 2021, the Supreme Court had produced 111 judgments since his appointment, 53 in 2020 and 58 in 2021, with Lord Reed himself sitting in 56 of these cases. These decisions give us an opportunity to assess how his Supreme Court is performing in the current malign political atmosphere ...”

“... bourgeoisie, buying inoculation for their children and, if they hadn’t had the disease when young, for themselves. Inoculation came to seem safe enough, though there were notable and well-publicised accidents: the earl of Sunderland’s son died after being inoculated and so did a footman of the earl of Bathurst – ‘a strong, hail ...”