“... these days has become a trickle – a trickle supervised in the Express’s case by an owner, Richard Desmond, who made a lot of his money from masturbatory aids such as telephone chat-lines and Asian Babes magazine. We should, however, beware of the temptation to chart a nation’s moral decline through the personalities of its newspaper ...”

“... bizarre forgotten episodes in English history. Louis crossed the Channel, landed at Thanet on 21 May 1216 and proceeded to London, then securely in the hands of the rebels, where he was proclaimed king, though not crowned. This invasion, or calling-in if you prefer, was just as much intended as a remedy against arbitrary rule as the invitation to William of ...”

“... It has been thought and the thought has been put into effect.’ The Western model of capitalism may have won – or survived – the Cold War, but so did the bomb. In fact, the bomb proliferated, and new nuclear powers emerged, driven by conflicts scarcely related to superpower confrontation. Thanks to the collapse of communism, we are no longer sure that ...”

“... German killed (elsewhere it had been even worse: fifty for every German). Kappler – played by Richard Burton in George P. Cosmatos’s film Massacre in Rome (1973) – had to come up with names very quickly: the killings were to be carried out within 24 hours of the attack. In the film we see Burton at a desk, adding the names of political prisoners, men ...”

“... as the baby’s middle name, and who gave the child the surname of her estranged husband, Richard Aldington, though he was not the father.But let’s back up: Hilda Doolittle was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1886, the only daughter and second child of the second marriage of Charles Doolittle, professor of astronomy and mathematics and Civil War ...”

“... and proceeded to turn it into ‘a brothel of shame’ and him into a nervous wreck. Whatever may have been Lukács’s need for self-punishment, expiation and redemption, it was this weird experience, typical of the Dostoevsky-dominated decade of the Great War, which brought him into contact with revolutionary politics. As to the disastrous affair ...”

“... sexuality to a mnemonic principle of classification by means of which ‘one man’s experience may be communicated to others, and the objects safely reasoned on while absent’. His system failed to achieve the dimensions of a philosophy, since it did not reveal the ‘constitutive nature and inner necessity of sex itself’. The Linnaean code, he ...”

“... in the West sees it as a cautionary tale.An effort to rehabilitate the memory of the war may therefore seem to have a certain romantic quality. A former CIA officer enlisted in the war effort, Paul Miller is one of the few US officials of that period who focused his career on Afghanistan. From the CIA he made his way to the staff of Douglas ...”

“... for the law or the church, but he doesn’t seem to have pursued any particular career. Illness may have checked his ambition: bladder stones left him in a ‘condition of constant and dangerous and most painfull sickness’. Later he would recall that not a single moment of his youth had been without pain. Yet when the diary begins, he’s exultant. The ...”

“... after 1918. ‘Not a great picture,’ Tomkins says of Nude; and Seigel remarks that ‘there may not be many people today who prefer Duchamp’s work to that of, say, Picasso or Matisse – nor should there be.’ It’s true that Nude has become one of the great clichés of Modernism, and a fashionable restaurant in Philadelphia has based its whole ...”

“... gets bad reviews at a fashion opening and immediately bans the press from all future ones, he may seem to be indulging in a silly fit of pique, but in fact such a move is often a necessary business tactic. Commercial buyers may pledge huge sums in advance of a show, against the clothes they expect to order from it in ...”

“... included a couple of Bolshevik women from the Russian intelligentsia, one of whom (Ludmilla Stal) may have inspired his pseudonym. Fifteen affairs in two decades of mainly unmarried life in a free-living revolutionary milieu hardly qualifies Stalin as a womaniser, and Montefiore admits as much, noting that ‘women ranked low on his list of priorities, far ...”

“... would’ve, or did you?’ they asked. ‘I did,’ said Ingram, quite calmly. A psychologist, Richard Peterson, was brought in to help interrogate Ingram: his role was vital because he gave Ingram an explanation of what was happening to him. When Ingram asked why he had no memory of what he’d done, Peterson told him that it was ‘not uncommon for ...”

“... strange old books and ornaments brought from the old country. They know the words of old songs. It may even be that second-generation immigrants, feeling discriminated against, misunderstood and rejected by America, seek to immerse themselves in the culture and ideals of their parents’ homeland, fabricating a hybrid identity for themselves based on an ...”

“... The storm broke because of the surprising inroads of the New Criticism into the academy. We may consider the New Criticism rather tame, and appreciate it for introducing a tougher pedagogical stance, but traditional scholars feared that its exclusive emphasis on the specifically literary qualities of novel or poem would isolate these from the ...”