“... to spring a trap in our minds. ‘Rural England is where urban England now dumps its rubbish,’ Richard Girling writes. ‘Here it tips everything from garbage in landfills to fridges in ponds, broken cars and surplus people.’1 The Daily Mail says there is a plague of rats in Britain as a result of the lack of care taken in refuse collection. The ...”

“... down the trumpet ‘just like you’re spitting paper pellets at the school bully’. One morning, Richard Lloyd, the cathedral organist, a man who like my father never got angry, auditioned me at his grand piano and offered me a place in the cathedral choir. I was ten years old. Despite the name, most of the boys at the Chorister School weren’t ...”

“... an urbane ditto to their ruthlessness. Almost as if to show that academics and intellectuals may be tough guys, too – the most lethal temptation to which the contemplative can fall victim – Berlin’s correspondence with this little cabal breathes with that abject eagerness that was so much a part of the one-time Anglo-American ‘special ...”

“... French ‘naturalists’ – these prose ‘scientists’, these ‘reporters’ – and they may have helped him onto a new footing. Back in London he went into the streets and was keen for the first time to capture passers-by and their shadows. He was ‘oppressed and depressed’ that summer, and his essay for Longman’s grew out of all of these ...”

“... of the Ottoman Sultan. The Russians comprised about half of the peoples of the Tsarist Empire. Richard Pipes has argued that Russia became an empire before it was a nation, but the judgment only holds by Western standards. In the Eastern context, Russian national consciousness stands out very early and starkly against the court cultures of Vienna or ...”

“... about anything, asking questions like ‘what was the First World War all about?’, but this may have been a game. He was the first member of his family to go to college. Normally, in the words of a neighbour, ‘you graduated from high school and you went to the mill.’ Warhol went to the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh to study art. He ...”

“... Ronald Firbank​ died on 21 May 1926, of pneumonia, in the Hotel Quirinale in Rome. He had lived alone for much of his adult life, and it seems likely that he died alone too – he had sent away the nurse who had been engaged to look after him. This detail comes from the only published account of the circumstances, by Lord Berners, who considered himself Firbank’s ‘only friend in Rome at the time ...”

“... Francine du Plessix Gray – ‘Francine Duplicitous Gray’, as Roth called her. Interviewing may not have been Miller’s forte but what was his forte? He made such a skimpy mess of the Notes on the Text for Volume Three of Roth’s Library of America edition that Roth went apoplectic in a barrage of faxes that must have had little lightning bolts ...”

“... that wants to be and can be your friends,’ he told the Colonial Office. Some, like the Labour MP Richard Crossman, were sceptical. Crossman accused Ben-Gurion, ‘the dictator who runs the Jews in Palestine, including the illegal army’, of playing a ‘double game’. The reason for the double game was that the Haganah wasn’t yet ready to defend the ...”

“... Archaeological Museum says. The couple were illustrious knights of the royal chamber of Richard II, Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe, ‘the Castor and Pollux of the Lollard movement’, as the medieval historian Bruce McFarlane called them. Neville died just four days after Clanvowe, the inscription records, in October 1391. The ...”

“... universal human rights, the rights of nature, and peace on Earth.’ These transports may seem peculiarly Anglo-Saxon, but there is no shortage of more prosaic equivalents on the Continent. For Germany’s leading philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, Europe has found ‘exemplary solutions’ for two great issues of the age: ‘governance beyond the ...”

“... nervous system of the poem and made the things around it shudder. In ‘The Armadillo’, Bishop may have implied a great deal about her own helplessness, but she managed also to suggest that such an implication might be both taken for granted and also fully taken in by the reader and felt. For Lowell, such an implication was precisely what he wished the ...”

“... research he has found nothing to suggest any involvement or foreknowledge on Johnson’s part. You may not believe this. But if you don’t, you won’t believe anything else, so best to stop reading.) It is the mismatch between Johnson’s fate prior to the assassination and his fate in its aftermath that gives this book, the fourth volume of Caro’s ...”

“... which the book’s Irish reviewers weren’t slow to point out. In an enlightened spirit, Richard Murphy thought the point was that Ireland might be encouraged to shake off such atavism, the book freed ‘us from the myth by portraying it in its true archaic shape and colour, not disguising its brutality’. Other reviewers took the opposite ...”

“... to the cause of peace.The appelés arrived in Algeria by boat, from the port of Marseille. Algeria may have been ‘France’, but for most conscripts it was their first time overseas. Enchanted by the landscape, the blue-green sky and the dramatic bay of Algiers, they sent home postcards of 19th-century paintings. ‘The topics of Orientalism are ...”