“... were organised into parties with uniformed paramilitary wings. They operated in what the historian Robert Paxton has called an ‘uneasy but effective collaboration’ with traditional elites, which wanted to maintain order and crush the left. Fascism, from this perspective, was born of particular social conditions that are unlikely to recur in the same ...”

“... for anyone who has not done it. We can know her preparations. The ones who were useful to her: Robert Lowell (her teacher and the author of the introduction to the US edition of her posthumous collection Ariel), Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Stevie Smith. Adrienne Rich, envied and wrestled with as an equal artist. Eliot and Yeats, her early ...”

“... transgression, gaiety transfiguring all that dread. Yet Greenblatt, having with whatever degree of self-awareness accomplished the fundamental shift from determinism to a random multiplicity, finds himself faced with a phase of history in which the end seems indeed to be inscribed in the beginning, in which the dice are loaded and all fall one way. There is a ...”

“... and her determination to make her argument accessible to those without any legal training is a self-consciously political act. Her introduction promises that legal terms will be explained as needed and directs the reader in addition to a useful glossary of such terms at the back; only on a very few occasions did I stumble across a word that eluded either ...”

“... of brooding about America and Europe, the past and the future, art and society, influence and self-reliance, was coming to a head in a gush of discussion. The issues raised by the Regionalists, the Mexican muralists, by the question of abstract art, or by Surrealism, were all pointing in the same direction – towards the definition of a truly American ...”

“... to tell. Naturally he is scathing about the British (and foreign) banks’ lavishing of money on Robert Maxwell twenty years after the Board of Trade had stigmatised him as unfit to run a public company; hundreds of non-bankers could have told them he was a crook. But Taylor’s book makes clear that this sort of misjudgment is what one should expect from ...”

“... with Christopher Hill, the Balliol historian. When Dell’s Committee began its work it picked Robert Neild at Cambridge as its adviser but Balogh, who was worried that ‘the fucking shits will get away with it,’ got his Balliol colleague, Andrew Graham, to brief Neild. The Committee’s report was a landmark. It angrily pointed out that ‘the first ...”

“... agent, the turned man. He has a public persona as ‘Ben Watson’ (apologist for his nocturnal self, the crazed poet), columnist for the Wire, broadcaster, and author of the monumental and magnificent folly, Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play. Watson, if he wanted to carry his argument outside the poetry ghetto, had to adopt protective ...”

“... in Michael Collins. None matters much to me nor, it seems, have any mattered to the Irish public. Robert Kee put it well when he wrote that the film’s intentions were honest and its central themes ‘historically wholly acceptable’. Not for the first time, however, Kee is in a minority position. The film’s historical compression has been transformed by ...”

“... from the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the Wiesenthal Center and self-respecting bookshops have boycotted it. I haven’t seen a copy anywhere: even survivalist bookshops seem to have run out. If you want The Turner Diaries and don’t want to buy an Uzi at the same time, mail order is still the easiest way to get it. The ...”

“... whom he greatly admired. (For example, seeking a stanza form suitable for his elegy on Robert Gregory, he silently adopted that used by Cowley three hundred years earlier in his verses on the death of William Harvey.) On the whole it was probably just as well that Trinity, the Ascendancy college, was barred to him. He often complained of the ...”

“... greatest story-teller’, an entertaining interviewee, a value-for-money guest on talk-shows. Self-help, patriotism and the game for the game’s sake are his constant themes. Mrs Thatcher overcomes doubts about his ‘judgment’ and appoints him the Party’s deputy chairman. Then the second disaster: he offers £2000 to a prostitute so that she may go ...”

“... neurophysiology carried out in the Sixties. It was then that Hobson and his long-time collaborator Robert McCarley decided to pursue their interest in the regulation of sleep and dreaming by intensively studying neurons located in the brainstem, the phylogenetically-older brain structure which sits at the base of our hypertrophied cerebral hemispheres. Ideally ...”

“... is compelled to treat as a second nature. This claim, too, had been made first in architecture, by Robert Venturi: ‘The main justification of the honky-tonk elements in the architectural order is their very existence. They are what we have.’ Eventually, Post-Modernism itself would be given a honky-tonk logo and shorthand promo: around 1992, its friends and ...”

“... Scottish control of the trade to England was a valuable source of revenue. Scots have long held self-congratulatory beliefs about their educational system. It is claimed that in the 18th and 19th centuries it was a bond, with all social classes using the parish school, and at the same time a source of social mobility so far as it enabled the ‘lad ...”