“... no less to interviewers and critics, even in writing (notably to Edmund Wilson). In fact, Malraux may scarcely have set foot on the Chinese mainland when he wrote The Conquerors. Yet the book convinced no less a reader than Leon Trotsky that it was based on first-hand experience. It even convinced an old China hand like Jean Fontenoy, editor of Le Journal de ...”

“... Paglia’s handling of the questions from the audience is good-natured and clever (‘As a fan of Robert Mapplethorpe I can’t object to being abused in public!’). To MIT students fresh from a day of classes in aeronautical engineering and computer science, it must have been a heady experience.The confident and witty persona of the MIT lecture, however, is ...”

“... that Edward cannot love ... he cannot respond to my love ... I have prayed that I and my baby may die, but we shall not, though this would free [him]. I am as strong as ever. I pile work on work till my body can scarce move for weariness, but nothing lifts the darkness from my soul. By 1911 the dangerous game that Thomas played with Helen had produced ...”

“... Dash, started working on an act together. Harry was fascinated by the French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, widely considered the godfather of modern magic, so when he and Dash put their tricks out to work, at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, they performed as the Houdini Brothers: with their thick black hair and swarthy complexions they didn’t ...”

“... and racism even in notes to his mum was, for Amis, a sign of humourless cultural Stalinism. He and Robert Conquest had also been amused by advance word of Larkin’s letters to Barbara Pym (‘I bet they were a bit different in tone from what he writes to you and me, eh?’). At the same time, he was unsettled by finding out how much Larkin had kept from him ...”

“... to the Government of the Netherlands for the surrender to them of the ex-Emperor in order that he may be put on trial. The issues that leap from every line of Article 227 are tracked by Schabas as they were wrangled over by states with histories, lawyers and agendas of their own. Was the offence of which the Kaiser now stood accused a crime known to national ...”

“... to prevent such a passage falling beneath foreign control. The relevance of all this to Mars may be tangential, in a century’s time maybe not. An age might have to elapse before there can be any returns on capital in the form of scarce minerals in minable quantities, the costs of whose transportation alone might nullify their value. For the foreseeable ...”

“... she is also the translator of Wyslawa Szymborska – while Renata Gorczynski, who, with help from Robert Hass, translated Tremor, I like even more for her willingness to entertain eccentricity in diction and lineation.) The second threat is from sweetness. Here, it is interesting that in his essay ‘Against Poetry’ Zagajewski cites ‘Gombrowicz’s chief ...”

“... lucid patience and justice, has done nothing better. To bring out three books on the same day, as Robert Lowell knew when he promulgated History, For Lizzie and Harriet and The Dolphin, is to ask for comparisons, indeed to cry out for them when some of the work is old, some new – and the more so when, as in Hinde’s case, each book costs the same to the ...”

“... coulisses of Argentine politics, and can fairly be called a participant as well as a commentator. Robert Cox of the Buenos Aires Herald, who writes with the authority of a fellow editor whose support for Timerman never wavered, says that ‘La Opinion gave lukewarm support for human rights and ... maintained weathervane policies according to the views of ...”

“... Or Debbie Ladley. She was 18, a nanny, and she had given some help to LAND. James Cutler and Robert Edwards record: ‘On 29 September 1986, she was hanging out her washing in her garden at Stragglethorpe near Fulbeck. A man grabbed her from behind by the throat and banged her head against the wall. She suffered a fractured wrist, a cracked rib and ...”

“... the most haunting stories in the book is that of the Tierra del Fuegian boy kidnapped by Captain Robert Fitzroy, Chief Officer of HMS Beagle, in 1830. The boy was given a name by the crew – Jemmy Button – and taken to London, where he ‘saw a stone lion on the steps of Northumberland House, and settled down to a boarding-school at Walthamstow’. On the ...”

“... then they will repeat exactly the condescending errors that cost them the Congress last fall and may lose them the White House next year.So the language of therapy and recovery is kicking in, if anything so bland and superficial can be said to have any kick at all. The words ‘fascist’ and ‘racist’ are never employed – perhaps from some exaggerated ...”

“... He tried this out on the theologians, and had to be treated to a firm doctrinal lesson by Bishop Robert Grosseteste on the spiritual inferiority of coronation to the anointing involved in priestly ordination. But priest or not, at Westminster, the king at his coronation would stand, as the emperors stood, on a disc of Roman porphyry, and at the centre of a ...”

“... belatedly proclaimed, of the European past. This last point, on which Douglas strongly insists, may provoke some opposition. For example, she says more than once that Hemingway proved to be a better writer about the war than Robert Graves or Siegfried Sassoon, even though they saw a lot more fighting than he ...”