“... student to find out what her invitation referred to, and accepted it only when she learned that William James had been there before her, with his Varieties of Religious Experience). The lectures were subsequently put together, after her death in 1975, by Mary McCarthy, as The Life of the Mind. The question that crops up, unstated, throughout Elizabeth Young ...”

“... most fatalities in every army were a result of disease and neglected wounds. The great physician William Osler was a small boy in Canada at the time of the war, but he might well have had it in mind later when he used to say that a man was in much less danger of his life on a battlefield than in most hospitals. Nowhere was that truer than at Scutari, the ...”

“... those that Mandelstam might have seen on his long, arduous journey towards a prison transit camp, as he crossed the steppe. The poet concludes by reminding us that tragedy watches over everything, ‘has all under regard’. Tragedy is here made to sound a little like the police state, keeping tabs on all its citizens. Yet Hill properly marks our ...”

“... In The Dome Doctor, released in 1925, he played a hairdresser, and there his dandyish dress and camp gestures have some similarity to images of Firbank, and to accounts of his unusual undulating walk. The children in Genzano found funny what was involuntary in Firbank, not knowing if it was a performance or not. Semon’s fame was such that he had different ...”

“... and the locomotive is used there to wheel up shot, shell and other implements of war … from the camp in the Crimea, to the War Office in London, the Commander in Chief now reports direct the state of the siege every few minutes … a telegraph submarine cable, 301 miles long, is laid in the bed of the Black Sea, stretching from the monastery of St ...”

“... who was born in the year of the Bolshevik revolution, remains broadly committed to the Marxist camp – a fact worth mentioning as it would be easy to read this book without realising it. This is because of its judiciousness, not its shiftiness. Its author has lived through so much of the political turbulence he portrays that it is easy to fantasise that ...”

“... lettering, as though it were quite normal. Carpenters had recently restored the concentration camp, and surrounding wire and watch-towers, the huts. More than authentic, the place was in working order. On that late afternoon, under lowering snow-clouds, men and women were stepping out of a number of buses. Condensation steamed over the bus windows. Drinks ...”

“... the control of the ‘father’ of the British bomb (the bombs of every country have fathers), William Penney. Justifying the expense and effort was not difficult. The Soviet Union blockaded Berlin in 1948, and had the bomb by 1949. The Cold War was on. It wouldn’t do to leave the Americans with the only Western deterrent. At the same time the knowledge ...”

“... of Puritan sects, whose quarrels disposed some of them to locate Antichrist within the Protestant camp. Yet Anti-Popery remained near the surface of English politics, and one might have expected to find anti-semitism there too. Certainly Jews and Catholics faced a common threat, for if Jews were believed to have any Christian credentials, those credentials ...”

“... committed than Jonson to the royalist or ‘court’ party. Shakespeare had at least one patron (William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke) with substantial Puritan affiliations. He himself must have been aware that the public theatres had enemies – and supporters – in both the Puritan and Anglican camps. Miss Heinemann sets out to distinguish Puritan ...”

“... of the mid-Forties got the Third Programme right straight off. The BBC’s Director-General, William Haley, credited himself with having created the network by two decisions. Programmes should take as long as they needed to, and not be curtailed to make way for, say, a fixed news bulletin. Schedulers were urged to be as creative as they liked with an ...”

“... his salary in 1986 was $550 million, which, on the Buchan-approved capitalisation model of Sir William Petty (20 times one’s annual income), made his personal worth about $11,000 million. Just as we are deciding that this is an achievement to wonder at, Buchan adds with some severity that ‘fortunes made in finance ... require little intelligence and ...”

“... Miltonic; in later years, Robert Morehead transformed Dante into a second Spenser, while Thomas William Parsons made him out to be ‘stately and solemn’ in the manner of ‘Gray and Dryden’. T.S. Eliot’s essay of 1929 argues against such Anglocentric and Italocentric definitions, but only by ascribing even greater consistency and homogenising power ...”

“... the planned assassination appeared gratuitous. So Amonasro has disappeared, Amneris has gone to camp, and Radamès is as useless as ever. (His suggestion to Aida that they sail off to an isle in the Nile where they can be happy together she rightly rejects as impractical.) With Verdi’s dramatic structure thus in shambles, the Aida character must now be ...”

“... ancestors. Visions of future happiness are all very well; but happiness is a feeble, holiday-camp kind of word, resonant of manic grins and multicoloured jackets, not least when compared with the kind of past which, as Marx commented, weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. Benjamin was not wholly sceptical of the future, as Fredric Jameson ...”