“... remain a stinging nettle in the path of all ‘life-writers’. In the introduction to his life of George Orwell, Crick said that most biographies were just dressed-up historical novels. They drafted a nicely shaped psychological plot for their subjects, and then – whenever the subject failed to follow that plot – twisted or invented the evidence with ...”

“... and feminists. On his mother’s side, Schlesinger was a Mayflower Wasp who claimed descent from George Bancroft, the Michelet of American historical writing. His father was a Midwest-born social historian with a German-Jewish background, for whom the prairie populism of the turn of the century was still an animating inspiration. Arthur Senior and Elizabeth ...”

“... and it was there, on her arrival, that Hannah Arendt deposited the surviving manuscripts of Walter Benjamin. Characteristically, and perhaps accurately, she thought that the Frankfurt people handled them dishonestly. New York in the Fifties was Weimar in partibus. There are emigrations and emigrations. Chateaubriand elegantly described the French ...”

“... On​ 14 November 1968, New York University hosted a debate between the economists Walter Heller and Milton Friedman at the Graduate School of Business, a block from Wall Street. The event was advertised as a confrontation between two men engaged in a war for the soul of American economic policy. In retrospect, it might not sound like a clash of the titans – Milton Friedman versus who? – but in 1968 Walter Heller was a well-known figure ...”

“... possession was never just the mixture of theatre and contrivance depicted by philistines like Walter Bagehot. It was more like an identity-fabric which, in the odd conditions of Empire-Britain, stood in for other forms of nationalism. With only a few years of hindsight it is obvious how such a moral structure can vanish far more utterly than places and ...”

“... if only for a while, and only for a relative handful of readers. This is better than what Walter Benjamin calls God’s remembrance, since God, in Paley’s view, is another of those men who are always looking the other way. A character in one of her stories draws up an inventory of all her troubles. ‘The list when complete could have brought tears ...”

“... yawns, they mostly lost their heads, like the distinguished (‘wit, raconteur and’) designer George Nelson in four pages of ad hominem bad temper in the AIA Journal for December last. Part of that ill-tempered display, however, might be due to Nelson recognising some of Wolfe’s snide stories as ultimately his own, for Nelson, along with Peter ...”

“... theatrical, feminine mother who bore seven children, read romantic fiction – including Sir Walter Scott – and dominated her family. There seems to have been much struggle against her daughter’s adolescent ‘William Cather Jr’ role: Willa wanted none of the Southern lady posture and decorum. But the mature Cather came to acccept the unspoken bond ...”

“... zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, and moving into the Altenburg Palace on the outskirts of town; Thackeray, George Eliot, Smetana, Berlioz and Wagner all visited. Liszt engaged better musicians, improved the repertory, old and new, and included his own compositions. He put Weimar back on the cultural map, but didn’t get the support he hoped for from the court. He ...”

“... submissions to it, make an edifying contrast both with earlier state trials, such as that of Sir Walter Raleigh, and with the sanguinary revenge which followed the Restoration. Cooke, who was born in 1608 into a modest Leicestershire farming family and had established a practice at the Bar by hard work and ability (his clients included Fairfax and ...”

“... to Holyhead. The Company failed soon enough and Jones returned to writing, publishing two sub-Walter Scott epic poems, Corayda and Lord Lindsay, and most ambitiously, My Life, a verse novel cum autobiography which Taylor sees as having affinities with Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’. The main character is Jones’s idealised version of himself as the ...”

“... city hall. In Munich, Lee Miller was photographed soaping herself in Hitler’s bath. Walter Sanders caught the wife and daughter of an American soldier drinking tea in a luxurious dining car, looking out at the train next to them, in which DPs were squashed into boxcars. Sollors has unearthed interesting and troubling material about the ...”

“... but depriving them of rights was not seriously discussed. Glover takes as his starting point George Eliot’s sympathetic and complex treatment of the mid-Victorian dilemmas of Jewish existence in Daniel Deronda (1876), which he describes as ‘the single most influential English work of fiction about Jews, Judaism and modernity in the decade immediately ...”

“... and one-time day labourer, had accumulated a quarter of a million by the time he died in 1835. George Hammond, a cheesemonger whose assets were probated in 1839 at £140,000, had begun as a shopboy. If you had a lot of money, the secret of dying rich lay of course in the art of staying rich. This meant not only avoiding obvious perils – like those junk ...”

“... Was​ the course of 20th-century British painting set when Walter Sickert decided he didn’t like standing out in the cold? His first biographer (and former student), Robert Emmons, insisted that ‘SICKERT IS ONE OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS’ on the grounds that, though not an original member, he was ‘so closely allied to them both in method and sentiment, as to take his place, naturally and inevitably, within the innermost circle of the school ...”