“... confronted in the 19th century remain [oh dear ...] those of the 20th century ... Thoughtful men may reject the cures he recommended, but we ignore his diagnosis at our peril.’ The essay itself, the most interesting of the four, describes and assesses three kinds of history: the ‘monumental’ or heroic, the antiquarian and the critical. The main butts ...”

“... Though he served the lyric stage conscientiously, Hofmannsthal also found in his partnership with Richard Strauss release from an artistic impasse of the kind described in his Letter to Lord Chandos: instead of being constrained to devise drama that was like ‘a tone-poem lacking music’, he now had music itself at his disposal. Auden ...”

“... re-estimating of Soviet military potential in 1976. The more or less openly crazed Team B, led by Richard Pipes, was invited in by the CIA to re-work the Agency’s established estimates of its rival’s strength in such a way that the only possible thing for the US to do was to conduct a massive and feverish arms build-up. The figures arrived at by Team B ...”

“... grimness of most of the story. For younger readers, formed in the Thatcherite world, the account may arouse the same incredulity, concerning a world they could barely imagine, as a visit to the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum. But this passionless account comes at a price. The second telling aspect is Heath’s extraordinary lack of reflection about ...”

“... be flabbergasted as the head of the opera company, Nicholas Payne, tries to sell him the director Richard Jones’s scheme for the Ring. In Die Walküre Fricka would arrive not in a chariot drawn by rams – as specified by the composer – but in a collapsible car. ‘What can I say?’ Haitink sighs, and the show goes ahead. What he made of the obscenely ...”

“... most fulfilled by leaders who are, or at least resemble, movie stars ... No less an expert than Richard Nixon assured Elvis that he had the power over people’s imaginations that would enable him to obtain high office ... In truth, Elvis aspired to an office higher than that occupied by any president. He viewed himself as one who ruled the world by virtue ...”

“... whereas in fiction they really do. The novel has come to feel guilty about this art (the guilt may even be the symptom of a terminal disease), and novelists have tried hard – and in the case of someone like Virginia Woolf all too obviously – to avoid creating the novel’s all too solid artificial worlds. Dostoevsky does not appear to try; his genius ...”

“... by major mutinies: some large towns were held by mutineers with local support for up to a week. In May 1949 two frontier battalions defected, with their officers, to the North. Meanwhile, guerrilla warfare broke out throughout much of the South, and was particularly strong on Cheju Island, off the south coast – the furthest point from North Korea. Cumings ...”

“... as terrorism, holy war, human rights and the status of women. In his entry on Terrorism, Augustus Richard Norton argues that the ‘deliberate and random uses of violence for political ends against protected (i.e. non-combatant) groups’ has historic roots in the Middle East, but is far from being exclusive to one confession. He maintains that the first ...”

“... whose partial, perspectival nature he was thus more likely to spot than, say, a Briton like Richard Hoggart, reared within a working-class milieu which seemed to be wall-to-wall. Hall was pitched between conceptual systems as well as countries, alert to the rough edges of any single doctrinal system, as heterodox in theory as he was hybrid in ...”

“... liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of money-making.When Manchette began writing crime novels in the late 1960s, the polar (a slangy truncation of roman policier) was a straightforward procedural, spiced up with tales of small-time gangster lowlife. He took ...”

“... Pinocchio that it is Collodi’s original that has come to seem like the revised version. As Richard Wunderlich and Thomas Morrissey write in their study of Pinocchio in America, ‘Pinocchio’ Goes Postmodern (2002), Collodi’s novel is now merely a ‘version among versions’: an adult version in their view, unsuitable for children, because no ...”

“... The Literary Brat Pack was a journalistic readymade, roping together a number of writers who may have scarcely known each other and treating them as a floating soirée. It was cartoonish and unfair to most of the individuals involved, but the thing about catchphrases is that once they click, they stick. And for a brief spell, Jay and Bret obliged the ...”

“... my life I woke up wanting to do something to make it happen faster.’ As a schoolgirl Ypi reads Richard Wright, learns about the capitalist enemies who want to turn her beloved country into a shopping mall, and encounters odd European tourists, some of whom seem to pity her and some of whom treat her like a precious specimen. Small anxieties balloon in her ...”

“... school linked with mine was always known simply as the Boy from Chick. The hanging incident was in May. Two months later, the press arrived again. On Tuesday 13 July, the Metropolitan Police raided a house in Lees Holm, a mixed area between mostly Asian Savile Town and mostly white Thornhill Edge. Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the 7 July bombers, had ...”