“... to point out the ‘tragic heart’ of Glasgow’s hellish industrial reality and set it against Walter Scott’s ‘ain romantic toon’, the Edinburgh of magical hallucinations and historical fantasies. In that sense the argument between Scotland’s two biggest cities – and most of it resides in jokes – is little more than an enjoyable clash between ...”

“... the clip is a unit of communication in itself, like a gag or an anecdote or a bit of graffiti. Walter Benjamin imagined an ideal book consisting of nothing but quotes. A conversation made up entirely of quotes was always more likely, but the internet has made possible for everyone a feat that previously could have been managed only by two people with ...”

“... us. First, his great courtesy does not permit him to attack any historicists more modern than Walter Leaf, the author of the standard commentary on the Iliad, and Gilbert Murray, who both died many years ago. Secondly, he does not explain how it has come about that during the last century poetry has so often been criticised and judged from a historical ...”

“... relief expedition has been hacking through textbook surveys for several decades. Robert Butts and Walter Cannon have called attention to the scientific and philosophical contributions of the ‘Cambridge Network’ – men like William Whewell, Adam Sedgwick, Charles Babbage, George Airy, John Herschel and John ...”

“... if that excused them) and the context in which Elie’s piece appeared was sufficiently febrile (George Floyd’s portrait was on the cover of that issue of the New Yorker) that it caused quite a fuss. Not long afterwards, Flannery O’Connor Hall, a dormitory building at Loyola University Maryland, was renamed Thea Bowman Hall in honour of an African ...”

“... evasion, moderation, hesitance and deflection.Recent events, most obviously the murder of George Floyd, suggest the pressing need for a confrontation with the deep history of institutional failure to act in the wake of spectacular racial violence. This negative impulse has a long lineage, as do its characteristic patterns of response: eventual ...”

“... only Wagner can be said to have secured an ‘ism’ (following her trip to Weimar in 1855, George Eliot referred to the ‘propaganda of Wagnerism’). The closest precedent might be Byronism, a similar conflation of radical politics, sex and celebrity that overwhelmed existing artistic divisions. By the late 1800s, Wagnerism had become a pervasive ...”

“... by Nazism and culpable in Gandhi’s 1948 assassination.† The defamation campaign against George Soros and the conspiracy-fuelled crackdown on India’s leading think tank, the Centre for Policy Research, are only the latest in a series of measures – bribing opposition politicians to defect; unleashing mobs to attack opponents on the streets and on ...”

“... narration.’ Lawrence’s own view of the Anabasis was tellingly different. It was, he wrote to George Bernard Shaw, a ‘pretentiously simple’ tale, ‘cunningly full of writing tricks’. The essays in The Long March, a much needed new companion to the Anabasis, provide explanations of some of these tricks. Whether analysing the Ten Thousand as a mobile ...”

“... Jewish suspects were John Pizer, a shoemaker known as ‘Leather Apron’; Severin Klosowski alias George Chapman; Michael Ostrog, described by a police investigator as ‘a mad Russian doctor and convict, and unquestionably a homicidal maniac’; and Joseph Isaacs. A few brief sightings of the Ripper, of varying reliability, concur in certain aspects: a man ...”

“... he was for complicated reasons penniless and in practical terms homeless. His surviving brother, George, who would die of intestinal tuberculosis two decades later, was in America with his wife, Georgiana, trying to make his fortune; his dearest friend, Charles Armitage Brown, was on a summer walking tour, having frugally rented out the house he had been ...”

“... dirty smokey London’. He took tea with the Lyells (good science guaranteed no entrée here: George Busk was excluded on account of his wife’s rank). With characteristic diffidence Darwin saw himself as ‘only a sort of Jackall, a lions provider’: but lions like Sedgwick and Lyell were roaring approval at the Cambridge Philosophical and gentlemanly ...”

“... where he worked for the German-language radio service and first met future GDR leaders like Walter Ulbricht. After 1945, a job at the Soviet-controlled Berlin Radio was followed by a posting to Moscow as a member of the new East German diplomatic corps, until he was ordered back to East Berlin to work in the fledgling intelligence service. He became its ...”

“... on the SS Lapland. When they arrived they were tested on a field rented by one of the Committee, Walter Gordon Wilson, a specialist in gearboxes and a brilliant mechanical engineer. Swinton had the initial vision: Wilson made it into reality. In June 1915 Swinton, still unaware of the existence of the Landships Committee, wrote a lengthy memorandum entitled ...”

“... and discounted. The mere thought of Frazer prompts unavoidable and dismissive allusions to George Eliot’s Casaubon and his ‘Key to All Mythologies’, a ‘beguiling and age-old obsession’ that obviously must be resisted. When Frazer, dealt with at the outset, turns up again in his proper historical situation (along with Nietzsche, Marcel ...”