“... They are value-laden, and the values are subject to change. Such change is the central topic of John Woolford’s book. He, like Tucker, is interested in ‘the incidents in the development of a soul’ – specifically, the soul of a Victorian poet subject to, and struggling for mastery of, Romantic poetics: but he narrates that process as one of ...”

“... the names of Rudolf Slansky, Ehrlich and Alter, Max Schachtman, Andres Nin, Amadeo Bordiga and John Dewey are, still, names with which to puncture an argument, break up a friendship, revise an article or inaugurate a new and daring small magazine. Keywords include ‘Doctors’ Plot’, ‘Deutscherite’, ‘PR Crowd’, ‘Vyshinsky’ and ...”

“... their mothers. And I liked old ladies who’d led interesting lives.One night in January 2002, she took me and some friends to see Saturday Night Live. (She’d been working on a New Yorker profile of the producer, Lorne Michaels, for thirty years.) It was the night Monica Lewinsky was doing a special guest appearance. What I remember most about Lillian that ...”

“... of the promised releases.’ After the Liberation, Picasso – though not a French citizen – took the chair of a Front National des Arts which sent the authorities a list of collaborationists, requesting their arrest and trial. In June 1946, 23 were sanctioned by a purifying tribunal, with Friesz, Vlaminck, Derain and Van Dongen receiving one-year ...”

“... The pub was run by a delightful family, a handsome widow and her two pretty daughters. We once took an American to luncheon there. Could he have been an American officer? I can’t remember. When I remarked that it was lucky to find such nice people in the local, he replied: ‘I’ve often heard that said over here. I don’t understand it. In the US we ...”

“... Her topic makes most sense when the details of diplomacy are placed in a wider context.In 1836, John Stuart Mill claimed in an essay that Lord Melbourne’s government had become ‘smitten with the epidemic disease of Russophobia’, an irrational panic that had triggered an unnecessary increase in defence spending. ‘Russophobia’ has never quite left ...”

“... view’. Jacobson sets the Moffats against more brazen scouts of empire, including their own son, John, whose work among the Ndebele, further north and somewhat later, typified the ‘open alliance between the interests of the local missionaries and the colonisers’ into which Robert and Mary, worried about land expropriation and enslavement, had felt unable ...”

“... to lead their own lives. When, later, he was one of the five ministers selected to check whether John Profumo was lying about his relationship with Christine Keeler, Macleod distinguished himself by avoiding his colleagues’ ponderous circumlocutions. ‘Look, Jack,’ he said, ‘the basic question is: “Did you fuck her?” ’ Sadly, Profumo continued ...”

“... hearthstone’. Strenuously resisting Howells’s characterisation of the aunt even as she took unexpected charge of the plot, Freeman initiated the first of the quarrels that were to trouble the family both within the narrative and outside it. Howells’s letter to the magazine’s editor, Elizabeth Jordan, has not survived, but according to ...”

“... designed and marketed male style from Playboy to Carnaby Street. Alistair O’Neill’s article on John Stephen, ‘The King of Carnaby Street’, for example, shows how Stephen successfully adapted a gay style to the mass heterosexual menswear market in the 1960s. Indeed, men’s clothing choices in general seem to produce a wider range of ambiguous ...”

“... a violin concerto. I called it a loose fan belt and the hell with it.’ Chandler, in his letters, took a similarly hardboiled stance towards ‘the fancy boys’, as he called the writers whom critics – all of them sterile phonies – said they liked. They could be divided, he wrote in 1957, into ‘the subtle-subtle ones … the stream-of-consciousness ...”

“... remitted to them.’ Mandrin further embellished his legend by freeing prisoners in the towns he took over – but only the smugglers, counterfeiters and army deserters, not the common thieves. It is no wonder that he is often called the French Robin Hood. Mandrin’s story, however, did not end like Robin Hood’s. The France of Louis XV, despite its ...”

“... is that his troubles were not more immediately fatal; what saved him, I suppose, is that no one took him seriously. The little we know about Urquhart’s early life comes mostly from his own pen, and is therefore not likely to be true. But there is one incident, vouched for in the records, that seems somehow emblematic. In 1636, after his father had ...”

“... a marital scandal in provincial musical circles. She was unamused and offended by his levity: she took his bohemian tolerance of such things as sign of ‘a deplorable looseness in my own character’. He abandoned the subject and, the following day, the diary. Clearly he could not keep it truthfully without some betrayal of his wife. He had not the first ...”

“... the war. Neorealism, a spontaneous development without leaders and with few manifestos, which took shape in the last days of the Second World War, was in some sense a negation of both Fascism and Futurism. It was born in opposition to Fascist propaganda, both aesthetic and political; it embodied a resistance akin to that of Italy’s anti-Fascist ...”