“... seemed to feel entitled to the world’s gratitude. ‘Because I am blessed by my good brain,’ Robert Horton, one of Browne’s predecessors, boasted, ‘I tend to get the right answer rather quicker and more often than most people.’ It’s not difficult to imagine Hayward saying something similar. He committed gaffe after gaffe – denying ...”

“... original publisher withdrew, and the judges quit in protest over his treatment. One of them was Robert Lowell, whom Seidel had interviewed for the Paris Review the previous year. Final Solutions, which was eventually published by Random House, is laboriously indebted to Lowell, though the poems often resemble what Randall Jarrell described as the ...”

“... Dash, started working on an act together. Harry was fascinated by the French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, widely considered the godfather of modern magic, so when he and Dash put their tricks out to work, at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, they performed as the Houdini Brothers: with their thick black hair and swarthy complexions they didn’t ...”

“... from climbing mountains would over-tax the Parliamentary draftsmen. Meanwhile England’s self-exiled pulmonaires were multiplying, braced for what Fleming calls ‘a luxurious stretch on Death Row’. But didn’t Robert Louis Stevenson at Davos protest at the lack of luxury on Death Row? Shut in a kind of damned ...”

“... trouble. Lea had been elected to the US Senate in 1911 aged 31 and evidently had a penchant for self-publicity. With three junior officers and three sergeants, all Americans, he set off for Amerongen with the aim of snatching the Kaiser from Bentinck’s château and delivering him to Paris (or, as he much later bragged, to the US government, which would be ...”

“... and was posthumously demoted to second-tier status by the modernist criteria of difficulty and self-critique.This ambitious catalogue to an exhibition curated by Melissa Buron of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, brings fresh eyes and careful research to his work. James Tissot: Fashion and Faith, opened at the Legion of Honour Museum in San Francisco ...”

“... a tank firing fifty quid notes over the lawn’, as Dein put it. A year later, José Mourinho, the self-described ‘Special One’, rocked up from Portugal. In 2008, Sheikh Mansour and the Abu Dhabi United Group came for Manchester City. Meanwhile Ferguson kept on winning and winning until he retired. Leicester, somehow, won the Premier League in ...”

“... and extraction that characterised Britain’s colonial ventures, challenging the chauvinism and self-congratulation that was for so long the dominant mode.How should today’s multicultural British public respond to events that took place centuries ago but continue to reverberate? The cultural critic Michael Rothberg proposes the term ‘implicated ...”

“... memorable over the lifetime of an editor or his magazine. On the other hand, it isn’t at all self-evident, not to me at least, that a bad or mediocre book is superior to an effective or interesting book review simply on the grounds that a book is a book and the authors of books are nearer to God than the authors of reviews. No one would deny that reviews ...”

“... modest estimates of France’s genetic continuity. Although at times the creature of a national self-image, he was never a captive of it.Where do these retractions leave the quest for the identity of France? In the last and longest part of his work, Braudel develops the elements of another approach to it, more serious and less congenial to collective ...”

“... her, then casts him aside for the newly returned Clym … What does she want? … some form of self realisation … to attain herself. She does not know how … so romantic imagination says Paris and the beau monde. As if that would stay her unsatisfaction. Clym has found out the vanity of Paris and the beau monde. What then does he want? … his ...”

“... Duhauttoir; Françoise herself lent Danton some of the purchase price. A 1964 biographer, Robert Christophe, speculated that Françoise may have had a child by Danton, and that he paid an inflated price to settle his obligations. He certainly drew on the dowry for his upcoming marriage to Gabrielle Charpentier, whose father was a tax official and the ...”

“... job and that every intervention by an editor involves a small surrender of the soul.’ He had the self-regard of the incorrigible scribbler, then, but not much else, and it was Althusser, apparently, who dissuaded him from a purely literary career. Yet Praised Be Our Lords, volume two of the memoir, is a great book. Fluent, witty, argumentative for ...”

“... will so govern contrasting predicates as to reflect the tragi-comedy of the human condition. Thus Robert Burton (‘Democritus Junior’), the sad creator of the great Anatomy of Melancholy, is commemorated (1639) in the Cathedral at Christ Church, Oxford:         PAUCIS NOTUS   PAUCIORIBUS IGNOTUS                HIC JACET ...”

“... were often strong, his taste, whenever it took off on its own – the early enthusiasms for Robert Natkin, the later advocacy of Arthur Boyd – was unerringly awful. Either way, it hardly strengthened his cause. Take another critical position, more independent but more desperate. This critic is not encamped. There is one sort of art to which he ...”