“... for self-gratification, her half-educated dabbling in public affairs, were adduced as a reason the French were bankrupt and miserable. It was ridiculous, of course. She was one individual with limited power and influence, who focused the rays of misogyny. She was a woman who couldn’t win. If she wore fine fabrics she was said to be extravagant. If she wore ...”

“... figure at his ease amid the friendly, mostly American group made up by herself, Walter Berry, Howard Sturgis, Morton Fullerton, John Hugh Smith, Percy Lubbock and a few other initiates. She emphasises the man’s ‘quality of fun’, and her James is ‘the laughing, chaffing, jubilant yet malicious James’, not ‘the grave personage known to less ...”

“... the whole working of the Underground, in the utopian tradition of Ruskin, Morris and Ebenezer Howard. A benevolent authority was to confront Londoners with the best in art, while at the same time pressing them to live freer, fuller and purer lives, preferably at the suburban ends of one of Pick’s lines. Profit came into it, yes; but ...”

“... eccentricity in both. The great American classics are not, I believe, comparable either to the French or the English, which are the product of stable, highly institutionalised and confident cultures. In its anxieties, its curious imbalances and deformations, its paranoid emphases and inflections, American literature is like its Russian ...”

“... Whether what he praised was worth seeing is another question. After hearing him praise Alan Howard’s portrayal of Coriolanus, I ran to the Aldwych with my knees high. There I found Alan Howard portraying Coriolanus as a Roman version of Carol Channing. He swivelled his hips and blew kisses at the stalls, which were ...”

“... spread to his lungs and his shoulder. On 12 February 1941 he was injected with penicillin made by Howard Florey and his team. Alexander’s condition improved dramatically. Treatment continued for five days. Penicillin was extracted from his urine and used again. But ten days later he relapsed, dying of staphylococcal septicaemia on 15 March: the supplies of ...”

“... September and October the greatest defeats in its history, capturing more prisoners than the French, Belgians and Americans put together … This is always forgotten. Wish I could tell you more – about horses! About mules! Yes, the poor bloody mules! My own study of the reminiscences of those who fought in France suggests that while Lewis’s zest for ...”

“... most of us start thinking up ways of not thinking about mortality. He bought glamorous pieces of French furniture and decorative art, a field in which it is relatively easy to buy reliable advice. He did less well with Old Master paintings, sometimes rashly employing his own judgment and sometimes influenced by insufficiently disinterested advisers. He ...”

“... of dollars. In early March, a reporter for the Figaro, Georges Malbrunot, said that according to French intelligence sources the strikes had unquestionably been carried out by a pair of F-35s: not only that, but one of them had gone on to buzz Assad’s palace in a fuck-you show of force.The F-35 is the most expensive weapon ever built. Israel took delivery ...”

“... saw it, whether it was the Berlin airlift, the campaign to free Marshal Pétain or the fighting in French Indochina. He was O. Henry’s proverbial ‘citizen of the world’, never in one place for long: for fifteen straight years, he claimed, he circumnavigated the globe; in one of those years, by his count, he slept in 97 different hotels. And his wasn’t ...”

“... to the William Dunn School of Pathology, and requested space, to work on tissue culture, from Howard Florey. He was allowed in, and assisted, in a minor way, in the main project of that laboratory, penicillin. He had set out on the path to research that matters. In so doing, he stands out among the zoologists who graduated from Goodrich’s school. Those ...”

“... the disruptive effect of war on Early Modern society which has been elaborated by Michael Howard and other historians. Ashton doesn’t examine the implications of the change in policy from war to peace after 1629. He ignores the two peace treaties of 1630, and the Goa treaty of 1635, which marked a new turn in foreign and trading relations. The ...”

“... on a rosy apocalyptic glow. These are not the uncorseted, feelgood ramblings of Sixties survivors (Howard Marks, Richard Neville et al), but the in-your-face, out-of-your-skull, trust-nobody, swallow-anything limbo that acted, it has become clear, as a curtain-raiser to the free-market excesses that were to follow. Punk auditioned the dark night of Keith ...”

“... and Essie Craxton, who tumbled up in a ramshackle household in St John’s Wood. Elizabeth Jane Howard, who knew them all when she was young and later wove them into her Cazalet novels, described the Craxtons as exuding happiness like pollen, which rubbed off. The pianist Harold Isaacs remembered overcrowded Acomb Lodge as ‘a very strange house’, adding ...”

“... by Geoffrey Hartmann, J. Hillis Miller, Edward Said and others, not to mention any of their French influences and inspirations. These were relatively early days in the Theory Wars, and Kermode was splitting his vote in a way that was both subtle and rare. He liked transgressions but rather wished that the avant-garde would wait and see if the main army ...”