“... leather and a little cap such as Orton himself used to wear. Here too an outfit that is not so self-conscious would serve the play better. The more ordinary it is the more shocking it will seem. 3 February. One of the cards of condolence we get on Anne’s death is unintentionally comical. ‘Sorry to hear your bad news!’ The exclamation mark is ...”

“... understand, are the pure products of disordered digestion’. In The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton wrote that the stomach is the ‘king of the belly, because if he be distempered, all the rest suffer with him.’ Early 19th-century physicians agreed: ‘It is a great mistake to regard dyspepsia as peculiarly or especially a disease of the ...”

“... persuade themselves that they are up against “human nature” itself.’ Christians aiming at self-improvement need look only to themselves: ‘Spiritual riches cannot be there, unless they come from you alone.’ This was a tough doctrine; Brown argues that it might have had a particular appeal to a Christian upper class now exiled from Rome and eager to ...”

“... and the modern political party was his home. Others, like the Italian sociologist Robert Michels, argued further that for the modern politician the political party was a form of social mobility, so that eventually the protection of the party’s bureaucratic structures – the machine – became more important than the interests of the people ...”

“... York this season is the Armani retrospective at the Guggenheim. Designed by the Post-Modern artist Robert Wilson, who has draped the Frank Lloyd Wright spiral ramps with white gauze, bathed the museum in patchouli and musk, and created a Japanese soundtrack to accompany the show, the exhibition is a perfect example of the blend of fashion, art, commerce and ...”

“... exoticism was going forever to refute his understanding of them. In practice, indeed, he struck a self-conscious balance between what he did and didn’t understand as a traveller, or, in the terms which he favoured, between the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’: the creative play between the two, once the Exote is in situ, is simply a local transposition of ...”

“... nights, criminal operations and complicated political double-dealing. The collaborationist writer Robert Brasillach pointed out in 1943 that it was an ideal setting for detective stories, and Patrick Marnham’s gripping book is a detective story of sorts. It recounts the life of a man who was, in himself, particularly opaque. Jean Moulin was ambitious and ...”

“... who had won a scholarship to read history at Trinity, fitted naturally into this highly-strung, self-consciously aesthetic milieu. He got round the rule forbidding pianos in students’ rooms by buying an antique dulcitone, an instrument undreamed of by the college authorities, overspent his generous allowance on ‘an impractically huge Breton oak ...”

“... European gift. ‘Our fascination’ with ‘Oriental civilisations’ stirred Egypt’s political self-awareness ‘for good and for ill’, his book begins. Passive Egypt offered ‘only minor resistance’ to invasion and occupation, he claims, until 1952, when revolution placed its antiquities in Egyptian hands – ‘for better or worse’. This is ...”

“... happen if their certainties were abandoned, desperately struggling to maintain their sense of self, afraid of each other’s contempt, they staggered from idealism to self-destruction.There was an enormous cultural response to the suicides. The following year, the film Germany in Autumn was made, with contributions ...”

“... that we are whatever we summon the will to do.’ But Murdoch was scornful of this heroic self-image, writing that the gloom characteristic of existentialist writing ‘is superficial and conceals elation’. She had no use for voluntarism about value in either its French or British form: value requires us to turn our attention away from ...”

“... Henry St George, the older novelist, offers the young writer Paul Overt a demonstration in self-sufficiency. He tells him a writer would do better not to marry, to put his passion into his work. Then marries the girl they both admire. That doesn’t stop Paul Overt offering an encomium to his elder and better. ‘Your talent’s so great that it’s ...”

“... of utter ruin. Branson’s line on Bower is that he got lucky a while back exposing the monstrous Robert Maxwell and is now trying the same trick on other prominent figures in the hope that lightning will strike twice. But Bower doesn’t portray Branson as another Maxwell. He never suggests he is a crook and he is almost admiring of the skill with which he ...”

“... industry was created in 1976 ‘over a couple of beers’ at a bar, in a conversation between Robert Swanson, a 29-year-old venture capitalist, and Herbert Boyer, a biochemist at the University of California, San Francisco. Working with the Stanford geneticist Stanley Cohen, Boyer had helped to develop some elegant recombinant DNA technologies which ...”

“... freedom struggle. The four political assassinations that define the 1960s – those of John and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and King – stand in for the very large numbers (almost all black and lost to national public memory) martyred to racial justice. It is now a commonplace that, instead of protecting Southern civil rights workers, the FBI (with the ...”