“... to Italy. Here he first met Edith Oliver, a spinster in her fifties, whose journals are one of the major sources for the life. Her first impression (‘a delightful keen boy who loves talking’) was not to change. He was equally pleased. After his first visit to her house, in the grounds of Wilton, he wrote of ‘darling Edith whom I adore’. She had never ...”

“... Craig and Plath by Gwyneth Paltrow. From the early 1970s more or less until his death Hughes was a major hate figure for those he and his sister, Olwyn, derisively called ‘women’s libbers’, who vilified him as the murderer of a great and courageous feminist poet. In 1972 the American poet and activist Robin Morgan published Monster, a book that included ...”

“... Amadeus.) Binyon’s biography has the populousness of Tolstoy. An astonishing number of major and minor characters are introduced – and thickly introduced, with a paragraph or two of data – and kept in patient sight over hundreds of pages. Even very minor figures, who appear only once, get a packed footnote. A French chef called Tardif, for ...”

“... and West? Orhan Pamuk is frequently described as a bridge between two great civilisations, and his major theme – the persistence of memory and tradition in Westernising, secular Turkey – is of a topicality, a significance, that it seems churlish to deny. His eight novels, the most recent of which, The Museum of Innocence, has just appeared in ...”

“... that resulted from the influx of European goods; high interest rates on loans; ownership of major businesses by foreign capitalists’. The war, which enfeebled the economies of the major imperialist powers – Britain, Germany and France – and further discredited their regimes, endowed America with both power and ...”

“... constituent pieces (well over a thousand of them) are now mounted separately. There are two other major miscellanies, both in England. One is the collection of drawings and manuscripts in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. This is also an inheritance from Pompeo Leoni: indeed, some of the smaller fragments at Windsor were demonstrably snipped by Leoni out ...”

“... found it either natural or politically expedient to enthuse about Europe. I grew tired of hearing Major and then Blair insisting that we were ‘at the heart of Europe’ when we hadn’t joined the euro or signed up to the Schengen Agreement. Politicians never tried to sell Europe to the British people as anything other than an advantageous commercial joint ...”

“... paid it little attention. No monuments or tributes marked the event. On the contrary, major Jewish organisations opposed such a memorialisation.Fear of alienating Gentiles by emphasising the distinctiveness of Jewish experience was always a problem for American (as well as European) Jews, and during the Second World War had inhibited efforts to ...”

“... was itself unprecedented. Its catastrophic results led to Trump’s election, and one of his major goals ‘was to return US trade policy to its realistic and pragmatic roots’. Historically, as we have seen, this is a justifiable claim. Lighthizer has every right to argue that ‘protecting American trade interests was one of the very reasons for our ...”

“... must be partly the help more recently given by such learned work on the art of inscriptions as John Sparrow’s, whose Visible Words, Line upon Line and Lapidaria are gratefully quoted in this and the following paragraph. For some three hundred years after the mid-15th century, a new art born in Italy swept Europe, accompanying the greater visual ...”

“... couple were illustrious knights of the royal chamber of Richard II, Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe, ‘the Castor and Pollux of the Lollard movement’, as the medieval historian Bruce McFarlane called them. Neville died just four days after Clanvowe, the inscription records, in October 1391. The Westminster Chronicle fills in the ...”

“... Kevin Sharpe’s Personal Rule of Charles I, Conrad Russell’s Fall of the British Monarchies and John Morrill’s Nature of the English Revolution all represent distinct standpoints, but certain common features continue to stand out. Rejecting both constitutional explanations of the Caroline crisis, and class interpretations of the Civil War, these histories ...”

“... Art and New Wave. To see her in sunglasses was to see it was so. And in Roger Straus, the dapper major domo of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, she had a publisher who was closer to a studio boss in his roles as promoter, protector, enforcer and profane big daddy. Partisan Review was Sontag’s Book of Revelation. She revered the magazine from the first moment she ...”

“... other OPEC powers; the dismal findings of the Simmons Report, spelling out the declining yields of major Saudi oilfields – had placed in doubt the Saudi role as a reliable ‘swing producer’, which could turn the taps on or off whenever it was in America’s strategic interest. The US government has, in its ‘special relationship’ with the House of ...”

“... has anyone else, much, in the 36 years since Shaw’s death, except the predicted biographers. St John Ervine skimmed their scandalous cream in his ill-tempered centenary life in 1956. Other scholars have browsed them for background material, notably Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie in their book The Fabians. But it has taken until now for any publisher to be ...”