“... also became a woman of business, a patron of artists and a close friend not only of Yeats but of Shaw and O’Casey, both of whom were to see their plays given a turbulent reception at her theatre. Dressing herself in a manner that was bound to evoke comparisons with Queen Victoria, she allowed herself liberties unthinkable at Windsor. There survives a ...”

“... a sinister beauty and the power to inspire wonder. Botting cannot resist borrowing for an epigraph John Masefield’s tribute to the great sailing ships: ‘They mark our passage as a race of men,/Earth will not see such ships as these again.’ This lively book is a zeppelin history which concentrates on the round-the-world voyage of the Graf Zeppelin in ...”

“... on in their cabin, and the electric heater – so that it ‘would be warm on our return’. John Thayer, a young neighbour of the Eustis’s in Pennsylvania, shared a suite of rooms with his parents. After the impact, which he noticed hardly at all (‘if I had had a brimful glass of water in my hand not a drop would have been spilled’), he told them ...”

“... 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 Greek ...”

“... about the state of society from the Bulger killing is probably a mistake. Blake Morrison has John Major in his firing line, for his statement that ‘we must condemn a little more, and understand a little less.’ An ‘epitaph to a brute culture’, he calls it. Not even his worst enemies would believe John Major is a ...”

“... how they spent the leisure time that the magazines of the 1890s loved to celebrate. George Bernard Shaw listed his recreations as ‘cycling and showing off’.Today’s Who’s Who remains a child of the 1890s. The editorial board stands by the book’s original intention, to recognise people whose ‘prominence is inherited, or depending upon office, or the ...”

“... worth speculating about. What, for example, is the truth of the legend that James Mill entrusted John Stuart’s political education to Place? Mr Miles does not touch on it. The story told in Iain McCalman’s Radical Underground is told perforce from the outside. There are no personal records to give an inner logic and life to the careers of the early ...”

“... precisely the sort of instinctive apprehension that was lost on someone like George Bernard Shaw, who, equipped as he was with an all-encompassing theory of the world, ‘has all the time been silently comparing humanity with something that was not human’. Shaw was typical of the heresy of sterile ...”

“... name of a fictional spy? Why couldn’t Fleming have used another pair of common monosyllables – John Clark, say? Bond is a solid, blue-chip, faith-giving kind of a name. Who wouldn’t prefer a government Bond under their mattress (we’re talking AAA British) to a petty clerk? Is your word your clerk? I don’t think so. Bond. It’s in the name. More than ...”

“... been delighted to afford it him. Instead, his post-conflict life was the strange half-world of Shaw and Ross, a couple of flaunted incognitos worn during his days as a ranker. They have fascinated posterity and produced a successful play from Terence Rattigan: but the thought occurs that whatever other driving psychological urge sent Colonel Lawrence ...”

“... problems’, encouraging cold air to ascend the leg while the stomach overheated (Shaw, of course, wore Jaeger knickerbockers); it survived all the efforts of the Men’s Dress Reform Party, four of whose fearless avatars are seen in a celebrated photograph on the cover of this book; it survived the hazards and vulgarities of mass-production ...”

“... these changes are localised and gradual that they are seen by some whites as encroachments. Shaw’s book on a Pakistani community in Oxford, for example, describes the hostile reception which evicted a family who moved onto a local council estate. Racial attacks, being less visible than fullscale communal rioting, are a ‘safer’ expression of ...”

“... They defend McQueen against charges of cruelty, misogyny and racism: the black model Debra Shaw appeared manacled and hobbled, the dancer Shalom Harlow was pelted by paint-spraying robots, models paraded on a constantly tilting floor in a re-enactment of a dance marathon, as in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Their descriptions evoke the way a call ...”

“... and philosophy is due to any social pre-eminence, because many of these illustrious Irishmen (Shaw, Berkeley, Swift) were the descendants of Englishmen, men with no Celtic blood; nevertheless, the fact of feeling themselves to be Irish, to be different, was enough to enable them to make innovations in English culture. I believe that the Argentines, and ...”

“... later: the transformation of his life and career, thanks to the good offices of Pound and Harriet Shaw Weaver, the editor of the Egoist. Pound’s unstinting generosity on Joyce’s behalf – hectoring, cajoling, and finagling support – is well known. In late June 1915, Joyce, his wife Nora and their two children were forced to leave Trieste for ...”