“... In​ 1993 the soothsayer John Major advised that fifty years hence Britain ‘will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers’. Still? That suggests these properties were extant in 1993. And maybe they were, somewhere. The optimist premier equated country with county, with his native patch, Surrey, where the past is never dead but constantly honoured in reproductions of varying degrees of happy bogusness ...”

“... values. It is at this moment that the cute fables, the family vignettes and the ghastly Janet-and-John style hit the real world with a thud. Britain under Thatcher gave the world privatisation. Blair is attracting equal international interest by taking the dissolution of communal wealth on to the next stage. New Labour is handing assets to corporate Britain ...”

“... Johnston, William McGrath, Carl Schorske, Allan Janik, Stephen Toulmin, Andrew Whiteside and John Boyer testify.* There are a number of plausible reasons for this. The first and most obvious is the great diaspora of Central European scholars brought about by the rise of Nazism in the 1930s – though some intellectuals, like Wittgenstein and ...”

“... and had to go to hospital. Stephen Sondheim remembers seeing her in Ravello during the shooting of John Huston’s madcap movie Beat the Devil. ‘I recall her sitting at an umbrella table in the square,’ Sondheim says, ‘rehearsing a scene with Edward Underdown, who played her husband. Above the surface of the table she was bantering blithely with him, but ...”

“... The Verificationist winds up in hospital: ‘would Jane, finding me naked on a metal bed on a cold ward, would she crawl into the bed and hold me for a minute, and stroke my head, and whisper sweetly in my ear, over and over again, telling me that, after all, we are married, and she doesn’t mind?’ All three narrators are, by the end of these books, deluded ...”

“... only evolutionary mechanism. Yet the EES remains contentious. The announcement this year that the John Templeton Foundation, a Christian funding agency, has awarded an $8 million grant to a multinational team of researchers, led by the evolutionary biologist Kevin Laland, to work on the EES has caused a rumble of dissent from hardline ...”

“... Square West overlaps an area identified by W.E.B. Du Bois in The Philadelphia Negro as the Seventh Ward, the site of many places famous in Black history: Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church; the Institute for Coloured Youth; the home of Frances E.W. Harper, one of the first Black American women to have her novels published. The official name of the place honours who ...”

“... as well as for medical interns. ‘Dr Crippen and Nurse Bell would have been thrown together in ward emergencies … They were married … the year that they met.’Crippen was born in 1862 in Coldwater, Michigan, to Myron Crippen, a merchant, and his wife, Ardesee, a sewing-machine sales assistant. Myron, too, moved often: Florida, Canada, California. For ...”

“... pupils, who included Aldous Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane, George Orwell, Cyril Connolly, Peter Fleming, John Bayley – a literary macédoine to which several other ingredients could be added. As it fell out, I had myself no dealings with Lyttelton at school, knowing him only by sight. He had the air of being young for his age, a tall, apparently genial beak, well ...”

“... in London, of which Gertrude was a founder member and which Freya attended, with Mrs Humphry Ward, in 1914, for both women were unabashed élitists who felt that their positions as privileged females would be undermined if their less educated sisters were given the vote. Both also held traditional views about the role of women and would greatly have ...”

“... pregnant so had to go through labour and delivery, and all without her husband, in a hospital ward marked with biohazard signs, attended by staff in protective suits. Frankie didn’t tell her parents; she felt guilty about not giving them grandchildren. The couple broke up. Frankie cut herself off from her family. She felt like ‘a murderer’. In ...”

“... example, author, with her husband, of My Boy Jack? The Search for Kipling’s Only Son (1998). (John Kipling died in his first half-hour in action – at the age of 18 – at Loos in 1915. Though his stricken father carried on a 20-year search for his grave, his remains were not found until 1992.) When not writing, the Holts run a sprightly operation known ...”

“... British Isles, Europe, Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way. I have always looked to the poet John Hewitt’s manifesto in order to salvage a coherent identity. He wrote: I’m an Ulsterman of planter stock. I was born in the island of Ireland, so secondarily I’m an Irishman. I was born in the British archipelago and English is my native tongue, so I am ...”

“... cannot think already to keep them from thinking’. Moore was echoed by the Superior Court judge John Fauntleroy, one of DC’s first black justices, and by Andrew Fowler, an influential black pastor. That Clarke was white made the policy of decriminalisation particularly susceptible to attack. Some, like Moore, suspected a plot to weaken blacks (he would ...”

“... Dwight Macdonald recalled. He was simply, bathetically, Delmore. Schwartz once conceded to John Berryman that ‘Delmorean’ would be the word used should his ‘verse prove attractive to posterity’. Posterity has not proved kind, something Ben Mazer’s edition of Schwartz’s Collected Poems sets out to redress. But this sprawling volume is no ...”