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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... One would like to know more also about the para-political myths of rural and urban life (George Sand and Flaubert) or the Walter Benjamin myth of Paris as the capital of the 19th century. Gildea ends his account on a happy note: French political myths of both Left and Right are, he thinks, alive and ...”

“... the launching-sites had been destroyed or over-run and the two evil geniuses of the V-2, General Walter Dornberger and Werner von Braun, were relaxing at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, cosseted and well-fed by the Americans, who lost no time in rushing them to the United States to further the science of rocketry. (If V-weapons had rained on New York and the British ...”

“... a rowing boat among battleships’; or that taking up some obscure and unfortunate critic of Sir Walter Scott is ‘like reading a review by a jackal of a book written by a lion’; or that an error into which he fell in the course of his recovering the faith of a Christian was the persuasion that he could no more ‘meet’ God than Hamlet could meet ...”

“... to one another – Browning, Tennyson, Dickens – as others embroidered, or they’d take Sir Walter Scott on ‘tramps’ through the mountains. For entertainment, there were church socials, dance halls, Firemen’s Balls, the Glee Club, community players: ‘I am going to play Susie in “Triss”, and we had a rehearsal tonight … I have the stage all ...”

“... National Endowment for the Arts): the other appointments announced on the same day were those of Walter Gropius to the committee on architecture and Basil Rathbone to the drama committee.’ The next page proceeds in the same vein: ‘At the end of the year, Auden was one of four new members elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters: announcing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with many names, different names for a familiar compound ghost.’ One of those names might be Walter Pater. In his essay on Coleridge, Pater referred to ‘that inexhaustible discontent, languor and homesickness . . . the chords of which ring all through our modern literature’. Eliot quoted those words in his essay on ‘Arnold and Pater’, only to ...”