“... the catalogue of the exhibition illustrate the book; there are also some somewhat drab woodcuts by Kurt Craemer. There is a lively introduction by Edgar Johnson. Bulwer’s book first appeared in 1834, when the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum were the object of great interest in this country. The discovery of the ...”

“... American, Anne Edwards, biographer of film stars, have turned up at this late hour? Can it really be that rather overworked rumour that identifies Prince Eddy, the Queen’s first fiancé, as Jack the Ripper? Indeed it can. James Pope-Hennessy did not find room to discuss this matter in his 685-page life of Queen Mary published in 1959, possibly because the ...”

“... period between 1890 and 1939 in which they underwent a revival. Against this background, enriched by the contributions of modern scholars from Denis Saurat to Frances Yates and Gershom Scholem, there emerge the first outlines of Yeats’s spiritual biography. As Professor Hough rightly remarks, this remains to ...”

“... a baby. When she gives a party in London ‘the champagne flowed and smoked salmon was served up by neatly attired waitresses.’ When she goes to Colorado, in 1975, she makes sure we know that it is the poets, Ginsburg, Burroughs, Corso and Anne Waldman, who give the smartest parties. She tells us twice that ‘aboard an almost empty 747 home from New York ...”

“... English literature isn’t properly an academic subject, while others believe that its study can be revitalised by adopting structuralist procedures and developing a ‘materialist criticism’. Partly, the crisis which now afflicts English studies is a reflection of a more general cultural atmosphere – for example, that ...”

“... in which he reflected on the political situation. Ulster, he said, had been cynically betrayed by Britain’s policies: policies that had relegated it to ‘the status of a Fuzzy Wuzzy colony’. The Lord Mayor’s parting shot is one of my favourite quotations, for as well as being banal, ridiculous, righteously angry and very dim, it offers a profound ...”

“... of the war, we who served behind barbed wire in public parks and on lonely headlands, surrounded by jolly ATS girls, were well aware that the public thought very little of our marksmanship. Since every shoot depended on dozens of people doing the right thing at the right time, the capacity for error was enormous. Then came the unmanned V-1, or ...”

“... pilot once said that flying is months of sheer boredom, moments of sheer terror, and the same can be said of expeditions. Much time on expeditions is spent waiting: waiting for the weather to change, for the expedition leader to make up his mind, for the other party to arrive, for supplies, for the ship, the airplane or the helicopter; when it isn’t ...”

“... to write no less than ten thousand words a day for the Herald Tribune. Celebrities who dropped by included Ginger Rogers, Moss Hart, Lynn Fontanne, Jack Dempsey, Robert ‘Believe-it-or-not’ Ripley, Elsa Maxwell and Jack Benny. They were in court less because of Hauptmann than because of Lindbergh, the biggest celebrity of them all. It is a sign of the ...”

“... as a figment of Hoxha’s paranoia. The credibility of his accusations was hardly enhanced by the fact that he claimed that Shehu had killed himself after being strongly criticised for arranging the betrothal of his son to a woman whose family allegedly contained ‘six to seven war criminals’, and thus attempting to create a scandal which would ...”

“... oldest universities. Neither phenomenon is new, but that is not all they have in common: both can be regarded as symptoms of madness, which is always making news – this, at any rate, is the diagnosis favoured by Nkosi and Arnold. They discount the talk of journalists and are at pains to show how states of emergency or of ...”

“... brisk notes made of Paris nightlife at the turn of the century, and then our attention is arrested by six drawings which include no topical reference at all. They represent a female nude kneeling, facing a larger, shadowy, seated figure of indeterminate sex between whose legs her head is placed. A seventh drawing shows the kneeling girl alone. The ...”

“... Determining the ‘source’ of a river is, it turns out, not a simple matter. There may be many plausible contenders. You can argue that it is the joining together and accumulation of the water from a number of tributaries that constitutes the ‘source’, not any one of them in particular. This issue gave pause even to Victorian explorers, not ...”

“... the land today between Israelis and Palestinians. The map most people recall is the one proposed by the so-called Priestly writers, who were responsible for Leviticus and a code emphasising purity and elaborate ritual distinctions, and were active from around the early eighth century BCE onwards. In this map the Jordan firmly demarcates the eastern border of ...”

“... small operations that barely manage to cover the cost of server space. Users are brought together by a shared (usually offline) interest and tend to number in the hundreds or thousands. While Facebook requires that users’ online avatars mirror their legal, offline identities, almost everyone on message boards uses a pseudonym. While exchanges are frequently ...”