“... was fortified in his convictions by such liberal intellectuals as John Dewey, Walter Lippmann and Herbert Croly (co-founder of the New Republic), who believed that by joining the war America would make the world safe for democracy rather than, as was the case, help the Allied powers deliver a knockout blow to the Germans. As Randolph Bourne, a young critic ...”

“... Democratic moment when the bottom fell out of the US economy, taking with it the presidency of Herbert Hoover. After FDR’s nomination in July 1932, his running-mate John Nance Garner offered some succinct advice on how to conduct the campaign: ‘All you have to do is stay alive till November.’ ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself’: the ...”

“... who for Davie represents those qualities which in the earlier part of the anthology shine in Herbert and Vaughan, Watts and Wesley, Smart and Cowper. That none of these writers has the obvious ‘scale’ or bulk of a Browning is perhaps to Davie’s view less a detraction from their quality than an instance of it. For what he looks for in a Christian ...”

“... dabs of kerosene light and the occasional brace of headlights showed a city was there at all. Robert, an Armenian PE teacher who had befriended me in the coupé, took me through the frosty murk of Yerevan’s central station and into a doorway. In an instant there was light, power, a swift transaction involving tokens, a set of escalators, and at their ...”

“... who had let it be understood that he was one of those hard-riding gentlemen like Major Robert Gregory, celebrated by Yeats for riding a race without a bit. He no sooner mounted his small beast than it reared and slowly bolted, dumping him onto the desert. Later I was told that this accident was more likely to happen to an experienced rider than to ...”

“... included paintings by Ernst and poems by the American Modernist Hart Crane, the French Surrealists Robert Desnos and Philippe Soupault and the German Expressionist Georg Trakl (in translations from French and German by Eugene Jolas). A decade later, the last issue was still churning out Work in Progress, now alongside work by Hans Arp, Beckett, Breton, Kafka ...”

“... at entr’acte, what a people’ is his only comment after a trip to Glyndebourne. One professor, Herbert Myron, receives such gobbets as: ‘Read in the Mill on the Floss (Chap. VIII) “Mrs Glegg had doubtless the glossiest and crispest brown curls in her drawers, as well as curls in various degrees of fuzzy laxness.”’ Another is treated with more ...”

“... a microwave tube called the klystron; the university is Stanford; the former President trustee is Herbert Hoover, whose eponymous Institute on the campus was to become one of the major free-enterprise-boosting think tanks; the commercial concern is the Sperry Gyroscope Company; and two of the academic scientists involved are the Varian brothers, who went on ...”

“... but his poems were used during the war in which such witnessings acquired unprecedented authority. Robert Lowell’s remark that it was as if Housman had foreseen the Somme is one of the more complicated signposts in Housman country. His youngest brother, Herbert, was killed in action in 1901, and his nephew Clement Symons ...”

“... he sneered at Hugh Gaitskell for not having any medals to wear on Remembrance Day and he loathed Herbert Morrison, his first boss in the wartime coalition, for having been a conscientious objector in the First World War, calling him ‘a dirty little cockney guttersnipe’. Macmillan’s diary is spattered with abuse of other public figures, often tinged ...”

“... endowed them. Before long Gay’s scrupulous historical habits began to spread, and by 1979, when Robert Darnton investigated the relationship between the Encyclopédie and the book trade in The Business of Enlightenment, it was clear that the study of 18th-century thought was changing out of recognition. From now on it would belong to professional historians ...”

“... rebuilding wasn’t a planner at all, but the city’s chief engineer between 1935 and 1963, Herbert Manzoni. Distrustful of architects and architecture, town planning and utopias, conservation and continuity, Manzoni shaped Birmingham as few other British cities have been shaped. Like Robert Moses in New York, he was ...”

“... Hermann’s at the 2022 Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels. (It was on loan to Lucas from the Robert Schumann Hochschule, a conservatory in Düsseldorf. How it got there is unknown.) Wang contacted the British cellist Julian Lloyd Webber, who in turn contacted Kennedy. On 29 September 2024 the cello, lost for eighty years, made its first proper public ...”

“... the bath. My mother’s family, the Peels, descendants, so Mam’s sister Lemira claimed, of Sir Robert Peel, had once been well-to-do, owning mills in Halifax. The youngest of the three sisters, Aunty Myra was the keeper of the family flame, determined that if her present did not amount to much, a sales assistant in White’s Gown Shop in Briggate living in ...”

“... and its allied disciplines shut up shop and go home. So we have the evolutionary anthropologist Robert Foley: ‘For centuries, humans have wondered about why humans are the way they are, and they’ve turned to philosophy and to religion to answer that question.’ But humans should stop doing that: Darwin allowed us to set philosophy and religion aside ...”