“... one type of beauty which he appreciated all too well. The bachelor don is today extinct. There may still be bachelors among the fellows of colleges, but the society in which they played such a distinctive role has vanished. The Royal Commission of 1882 had recommended that dons, like professors and heads of houses, should be free to marry, and amid lively ...”

“... the news failed, for essentially bureaucratic reasons, to reach the New Zealand Police. This may or may not be true. Either way, no doubt MI6 enjoyed the discomfiture of the French and the French, knowing they were being laughed at, hated it. As a consequence of the Greenpeace affair, the DGSE now has its fourth ...”

“... of his manner, including its open political bias and its embarrassing shortage of examples. What may be more significant, Peter Widdowson has for some years edited a journal called Literature and History, which publishes scholarly articles, more dispassionately written and usually more fully documented, on specialist topics such as the historical references ...”

“... argument, as there are, however, in recent alternatives to it. In his Shelley: The Pursuit (1974) Richard Holmes decided that both Claire and Elise had been pregnant by Shelley, that Claire’s pregnancy had aborted, and Elena was Elise’s baby. Claire Tomalin, in Shelley and His World (1980) argued more reasonably that the child was Claire’s; and in a ...”

“... Hercules dropping the pine-tree he’s just uprooted when he’s told that Hylas is gone – magic may lend grandeur to realism, but fantasy gains nothing from being made too real. On the other hand, the scenes on Olympus work well: Athena and Hera pay a visit to Aphrodite to ask her to make Medea fall in love. She is sitting on her verandah; she calls them in ...”

“... about booming and book wars. ‘So,’ Ford remarks, ‘if one can keep oneself out of it, one may present a picture of a sort of world and time.’ He never did keep himself out of the picture, of course, and never meant to. The autobiography in Return to Yesterday often amounts to little more than local colour. Ford ...”

“... Mac against a US standard. Belief in the stable identity of the product, wherever in the world it may be consumed, is one of the conditions of its success. Stability across space and time is central to both the notion and the value of a brand, and the McDonald’s brand, or the more specific brand of the Big Mac, is worth a lot. Note, however, that the ...”

“... The Family Idiot, and of Beauvoir’s America Day by Day; Lydia Davis, a translator of Proust; or Richard Sieburth, translator of Leiris, Michaux and Nerval. Instead, the publishers chose Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, two Americans who have lived in Paris since the 1960s and worked as English teachers at the Institut d’Etudes ...”

“... wealth, easy success, unproblematic seductions and vast readership. Even among writers, there may be odd moments of honesty. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who for the best part of 30 years shared a publisher with Zweig, Anton Kippenberg, founder of the Insel Verlag, wrote to dispraise him; when Kippenberg, foolishly trying to change Hofmannsthal’s ...”

“... business interests. Black senior died in 1976 by falling over the banisters at his home; he may have committed suicide – in any case, Conrad saw it happen. ‘Life is hell,’ the father told the son while they waited for medical attention. ‘Most people are bastards, and everything is bullshit.’ He died later that night. It’s no surprise to ...”

“... of the US Federal Reserve in 1972 to raise interest rates and risk a recession that would weaken Richard Nixon’s chances of re-election. When Paul Volcker was made the Fed chair in 1979, he acted without regard for the potential political fallout, raising interest rates to nearly 20 per cent and causing unemployment to rocket; in 1982, it reached a high of ...”

“... do not know the city very well,’ he later admitted. He also admitted that as a result ‘there may have been a good many who had not heard the proclamation.’ But then Dyer also said that ‘it was no longer a question merely of dispersing the crowd; but one of producing a sufficient moral effect, from a military point of view, not only on those who were ...”

“... Heaven,’ Banks wrote in his journal, ‘I have a sufficiency, and I do not know why I may not keep him as a curiosity as well as my neighbours do lions and tygers at a larger expence than he will ever probably put me to.’ In the event, his Tahitian curiosities didn’t make it back to Britain; they both died of malaria in the East Indies. In ...”

“... The chapters by Susan Watkins (on Nato and Russia), Régis Debray (on Nato and France) and Richard Seymour (on Nato and the UK) demonstrate its depth. But this is marginal dissent all the same. The alliance’s official motto – ‘animus in consulendo liber’, ‘in discussion a free mind’ – is almost unknown. But since Russia’s invasion of ...”

“... leader or the brutality of Simon de Montfort’s massacre of the London Jews.At first sight, it may seem unbalanced that Carpenter should cover 42 years of Henry’s reign in his first volume and only the last 14 years in his second. He explains this reasonably enough, on the grounds that the years after 1258 ‘are the more packed with incident, indeed ...”