“... his imagination. For instance, the 1921 Three Musicians constitutes a rueful apology to the poet Max Jacob, an old bohemian friend banished by his prim new wife; the 1925 Woman with a Tambourine (Odalisque) is ‘a message to Matisse . . . a rebuke and tease’; while Mercure, the most radical of the ballet projects, is a riposte to both Cocteau and the ...”

“... went down to in *nawes and sailed on and foundered in, the likely answer is the northern Black Sea or the Sea of Azov.’ The mythical land of the family home might just as well be thought of as *Indo-Europe, the land east of the asterisk. The evidence for this family is archeological as well as linguistic, but language is at the heart of ...”

“... immigrants from Lithuania and Poland, Hersh grew up in the 1930s and 1940s on the predominantly black South Side of Chicago, where he worked in his parents’ dry-cleaning shop and attended community college at night. His big break came – though he didn’t know it at the time – when an English professor at the college saw his promise and arranged for ...”

“... the day of his extraordinary speech in the House of Lords likening commercial broadcasting to the Black Death. It was as if I’d said to the present Chief of the Defence Staff that I’d met the first Duke of Wellington.15 March 1994. A reply arrives from John Major to a letter I’d written to him trying to persuade him to reform the House of Lords. It ...”

“... in 1989, he is arguing for the ‘brilliance’ of Reni’s best work. It may well be that Max Beckmann’s painting will win history’s race against that of ‘lesser but more popular artists such as Marc Chagall’; then again, maybe not. The pessimistic, dystopian Hughes speaks with no less confidence than his optimistic twin. His voice was already ...”

“... which sound in translation like the most commonplace ‘anguished’ poet of the Nineties, Max Beerbohm’s Enoch Soames or Gilbert’s Bunthorne. Such an incongruity reveals an important truth. As a result of the Revolution and its ideology, processed and imposed in public language and propaganda, anything that a poet could utter in his own private ...”

“... face, the blonde, slicked-down hair, the moustache, in spite of the gym slip, suspenders and black silk stockings; he sprawled athwart the knee of the second Mrs Mann, who sported a long-line leather bra and splendid boots. Hand raised ready to smack his exposed botty, she turned upon the camera a toothy smile. She’d been quite pretty, in a spit-curled ...”

“... up’. After Structure, it took another sixteen years for Kuhn’s next book to appear. This was Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912 (1978), the only monograph that Kuhn published after Structure, a detailed and demanding account of Max Planck’s role in the development of quantum mechanics. ...”

“... would have known why. Seated behind him was a thick-set shaven-headed young man in dark glasses, black suit and black T-shirt who, minus the shades and occasionally (and far too rarely some viewers felt) minus the T-shirt, appeared nightly on the nation’s screens in a television soap. The previous week he had stunned his ...”

“... Japan and every other late-developing nation was forced to confront – the ‘social question’. Max Weber put it bluntly: how to ‘unite socially a nation split apart by modern economic development, for the hard struggles of the future’? Weber was among the conservative German nationalists who saw the social question as a matter of life or ...”

“... the story that Reagan led the US to victory in the Cold War has flourished for nearly forty years.Max Boot’s Reagan: His Life and Legend decisively discredits that narrative with abundant evidence and convincing argument. This may come as a surprise to anyone who knows Boot’s ideological inclinations. For several decades he has been a laureate of American ...”

“... a stocky middle-aged man with a pallor so striking Sue Townsend insists it owes something to Max Factor. Shatrov is seemingly contemptuous of these proceedings; he arrives late, ostentatiously reads a newspaper during the speeches and from time to time points out items of interest to his colleagues. Sceptical of the purpose of formal discussions like ...”

“... sound analysis must be based on sound theory – in his own case, largely derived from the work of Max Weber – has ensured that his contribution will remain important. He argued in the late 1970s that the Trade Unions, the Labour Party and leftist groups generally were received with suspicion, if not resentment, by ...”

“... under my hip made worse from riding’. He had a ‘lump’ on his left groin. Eventually ‘black, dead flesh’ fell away from the sores. ‘Both my surgeons maintained it was the plague, and still do. I refused to believe them.’ But Erasmus was resigned to suffer – provided that Christ did not ‘tear him away’ from his body, the Church. Erasmus ...”

“... that this story is true. Indeed as late as the mid-Fifties I was present at a similar explosion of black humour. In the company of a girl called Robin Banks I visited the Magrittes, who had quite recently moved to the Rue des Mimosas – an indication that at last René was beginning to prosper. Perhaps because Robin was very pretty, perhaps because Magritte ...”