“... for the next three decades of frantic entanglement. Bowen had no intention of leaving her husband, Alan Cameron, to whom she was devoted. Their marriage, however, was unconsummated. Ritchie was not her first lover, but at her age, as he ungallantly observed, he might well be her last. She openly adored him, while he, an accomplished ladies’ man, longed for a ...”

“... musical innovations of the oratorios Christus and The Legend of St Elisabeth might have shed more light on a psychological change that had its roots in the Romantic fascination with the past but was rich in implications for the future – a kind of musical Pre-Raphaelitism. Liszt had retreated into religious contemplation once before, and there was nothing ...”

“... the cottages have been built. Expressionist weather systems have been brought indoors, a wall of light in the smokey darkness. These endearing celebrations of place glisten in the firelight, when the rock fields they represent are lost in the inevitable sea-fret, the mist drifting down from the hills.But they have to go, these images. They have to be stacked ...”

“... derives its artistic weight, while the ambition of a work such as Troilus is its undoing. A light-music element is found throughout Walton’s oeuvre, not only in Troilus (Pandarus’s scene at the start of Act Two is one instance) and, less surprisingly, in the one-act comedy of The Bear (Smirnov’s song, ‘Madame, je vous prie’), but even in the ...”

“... they had been given as a wedding present, but she didn’t say anything. Andy switched off the light. ‘That’s better.’ He took off his shirt though not his pants and lay on the bed, his hands clasped behind his head. ‘This is awfully kind of you,’ said Mrs Donaldson, wondering at the same time if they were going to take the coverlet off ...”

“... and findings, and point to intense pressure for results from frustrated military officers. In the light of these accounts, Abu Ghraib does seem to have been exceptional in its vulnerability to mortar attack, its radically overcrowded conditions, its low morale and obscure command structure, lack of coherent record-keeping and prisoner identification, and for ...”

“... the people he writes about, usually men who dress, as Woodward does, in dark suits, plain ties and light blue shirts, the better to be observed on TV – they never reveal much of themselves.What is known about Woodward? He’s a former navy man, who wrote several hundred articles on Watergate for the Washington Post with his colleague Carl Bernstein. The two ...”

“... Commander under whom in the West that victory was won. It should come as no surprise that in the light of history Dwight Eisenhower’s personal contribution to that immense achievement should appear more considerable than is implied by the titular and public relations role that was sometimes attributed to him. When he went on to become President of the ...”

“... like a fishing smack’.) And he solemnly unveils a growing self-conception as the Raymond Aron of light entertainment. ‘This was worthwhile,’ he writes of a sketch he directed for the Cambridge Footlights. ‘Sartre hailing the Chinese Cultural Revolution as an act of liberation: that was a waste of time.’ The sketch which James is proud of was called ...”

“... retuned from generation to generation, as well as of worldwide commodity fetishism. According to Alan Liu, in The Laws of Cool, it’s a ‘way or manner of living’ in a world structured by technological and other systems. Cool exploits the element of ‘give’ or ‘slack’ in any such system. It is information designed to resist ...”

“... the horrors of the first half of the 20th century. The title is borrowed from Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, whose social history of Britain from 1918 to 1939, The Long Weekend, appeared in 1940, and it conjures up a sepia image of a tranquil Indian summer ‘in which the sun set slowly on the British Empire and the shadows lengthened on the lawns of a ...”

“... skipped along the way. We didn’t know the song had originally been written and performed by the light entertainer Max Bygraves, but intuited that McLaren’s version was an assault on the middle-aged and middle of the road. Elsewhere on the record, Sid Vicious too defiled showbiz with his punk take on ‘My Way’, twisting Sinatra’s swagger into ...”

“... title, its brass-rubbings and its frequent dippings into the nitty-gritty of Christian rites, Alan Bray’s last book, The Friend, might not seem terribly exciting at first glance. And yet it is written in part as a defence of John Boswell’s Marriage of Likeness: Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, which came out a decade ago, and in part as sequel to ...”

“... Party. During the Eighties, in corporate donations alone, they gave the Tories a million pounds. Alan Rosling, son of Hanson’s vice-chairman Derek Rosling, went to work in Mrs Thatcher’s private office in Downing Street. Lord Parkinson, one of Thatcher’s favourite ministers, became a favourite of Hanson’s, and was guest of honour at Claridge’s when ...”

“... the whole has features not present in the parts. A good example of this phenomenon is given by Alan Garfinkel in his Forms of Explanation (1981), where he discusses predator-prey relations between foxes and rabbits. When the fox population is high and a fox kills a rabbit, there is overdetermination. The fox caused the death of the rabbit, but had that fox ...”