“... did he or didn’t he?’ Of course, not everything has to be footnoted, and truth may come from invention as well. One of the most vivid Anglo-versions of French social history was Robert Baldick’s Dinner at Magny’s (1971), in which everything that was spoken by the famous literary diners was a true ...”

“... 2011, the MSC broke the cardinal rule of journalism and gave the Met details of Sun sources who may have been public officials. For years News International had blocked inquiries into hacking at the News of the World; now it was volunteering evidence about corruption at the Sun, which hadn’t even been under investigation. Among the first officials to be ...”

“... instances of his using the ideas of others as a jumping-off point for fresh composition. It may seem strange that he needed to do this, but it involves a creative process, not simple larceny. Or is there? Is there – for me – a difference between what Dean calls ‘creative process’ and ‘simple larceny’? Or rather, between creative process and ...”

“... play, The Sad Shepherd, for her monograph on Shakespeare’s great rival. Given this history, it may seem surprising that The Shakespearean Forest is not a longer book, but Barton became almost blind as a result of macular degeneration and was forced to abandon her work. When she died in 2013 it remained incomplete and its publication has been a labour of ...”

“... world is clasped in their tenacious tendrils and covered with your verdant love. In the end you may even shed all sense of separate selfhood as you learn, with Spinoza or Hegel, that there is no true identity short of an all-encompassing God. Charity, it appears, begins in your own mind. We all started out, as Freud put it, with a cheerful ...”

“... Pope, who was soon venting his pique against ‘piddling Tibbald’ in The Dunciad, published in May 1728, and elsewhere. In this context of rivalry, the appearance of Double Falsehood seemed suspiciously convenient. What better way for Theobald to demonstrate his editorial expertise than to produce out of his hat a supposed lost play by the master? And ...”

“... would often delay the shooting of a scene because he wanted to discuss every element in detail (Robert Redford, who played the Sundance Kid, just wanted to hurry up and finish). ‘Then what Paul would do with the scene would have no relationship to what we’d been talking about for the last half-hour.’ He put far more agony and effort into his ...”

“... It’s apparently the style and not the opinions that he would have wished to disavow, though he may also have wanted to forget the poverty-driven hack work of his early years. What we know of his views on racial or imperial matters is not consistent with such a show of racial animus. Even his unillusioned anti-Rousseauist notions about savages or the savage ...”

“... genre as Philip K. Dick, however long Margaret Atwood managed to ‘pass’. Indeed, the solution may actually be a rather simple one, namely that modernism is not a genre, while SF emphatically is – and this opens up questions of an appeal to different reading publics, as well as their respective quotients of Bourdieusian ‘distinction’. Wittenberg’s ...”

“... belief that the Chinese care little about individual or human rights, however difficult these may be to realise in a Chinese context, should not survive a reading of these pages. ‘In my first year at university I felt I was surrounded by people in chains. But occasionally I would read Sartre. I was struck by his theory that to exist in this world means ...”

“... years younger, knew Rochester rather better than we or any other of the commentators on his life may be said to have done. In the months that followed his death she was to see her uncle become vastly famous, not as Marvell’s ‘best satirist and in the right vein’ or Shaftesbury’s ‘worthy’, but as a rake of the most rapacious and an infidel of ...”

“... room he had an absent look, staring into space and not uttering a word. Twelve years earlier, in May 1909, Bronia Nijinska had watched her brother wow the audiences of Paris, dancing the role of Armida’s favourite slave in Le Pavillon d’Armide during the first season of the Ballets Russes de Serge de Diaghilev: ‘While he is still up in the air a rumble ...”

“... freedom struggle. The four political assassinations that define the 1960s – those of John and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and King – stand in for the very large numbers (almost all black and lost to national public memory) martyred to racial justice. It is now a commonplace that, instead of protecting Southern civil rights workers, the FBI (with the ...”

“... and indiscriminately directed against civilians’. Indeed, ‘even where rebels may have been present in villages, the impact of attacks on civilians shows that the use of military force was manifestly disproportionate to any threat posed by the rebels.’ These acts, the commission concluded, ‘were conducted on a widespread and systematic ...”

“... Raban attempts to probe beneath the rhetoric to the actual experience of these emigrants. Robert Louis Stevenson’s caustic characterisations of his fellow passengers in his marvellous The Amateur Emigrant are delightedly and extensively quoted as evidence of the real motivations behind the movement westwards: ‘We were a company of the ...”