“... Brazil today has a larger population and gross national product than Yeltsin’s Russia. Yet, against all reason, it continues to occupy a curiously marginal position in the contemporary historical consciousness. In 15 years it has left virtually no trace in these pages. Popular images, despite increasing tourism, remain scanty: folk-villains on the run, seasonal parades in fancy-dress, periodic football triumphs ...”

“... little of the venom or relish of such fellow plutocrats as Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller. Most criticism he ignored, cultivating a forbidding taciturnity. ‘He left no record of his response’ is a familiar motif in the biography. What Morgan left instead – and what the biography exhaustively records and explains – are ...”

“... often convincingly, to Shaw’s need to wish away the intrusion into Shaw’s infancy of George John Vandaleur Lee – or, rather, the intrusion of the suspicion that Lee had been the lover of Shaw’s mother and was, perhaps, Shaw’s real father. In the teacher-pupil (or sculptor-statue) relation of Higgins to Eliza Doolittle, Mr Silver persuasively sees ...”

“... concludes his introduction to All What Jazz (1970), a collection of mainly unimpressed reviews of John Coltrane, Miles Davis et al that initially appeared in the Telegraph. ‘Sometimes I imagine them,’ he muses of the readers of his monthly column,sullen fleshy inarticulate men, stockbrokers, sellers of goods, living in thirty-year-old detached houses ...”

“... the principal object of contemporary economics and economic policy, and the rate of increase in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) its standard measure. GDP represents the monetary value of a country’s annual output, usually given on a per capita basis. It is commonly assumed that growth – compound growth, in fact – drives the economic miracle-making of ...”

“... was hardly Simonides. H.D., meanwhile, was being courted by another young poet, the American John Cournos, to whom she wrote in 1916, ‘If love of me – absolute and terrible and hopeless love – is going to help you to write – then love me’; but she made clear that ‘the great and tender and bitter Greek love is beyond my love for you.’ In ...”

“... it would have made little difference; On the Cultural Life of Modern America (1889) is full of gross inaccuracies, though he worked in the US as a young man and got to know the country pretty well. Where he got Britain and America roughly right was in seeing them as the vanguard of ‘modernisation’, meaning industrialism, urbanisation, the rise of the ...”

“... was a tough-minded drive to find mechanical explanations. When England’s greatest living poet, John Milton, wanted to explain why we are as we are, he retold the ancient story of Adam’s sin and consequent expulsion from the Garden of Eden. When Alexander Pope wrote his Essay on Man in the following century he took care to parallel his work with ...”

“... themselves. The portrait of the 18th century as the psychiatric dark ages is, he suggests, a gross oversimplification, and in its place he seeks to provide a richer, more nuanced analysis, albeit one drawn almost exclusively from printed sources and from such secondary accounts of limited portions of this territory as we already possess. On the whole he ...”

“... he devoted a great deal of his later imaginative effort precisely to not sounding like he used to. John Bayley, an attentive but sceptical admirer, once shrewdly said of the early Hill manner: ‘The danger with this sort of poetry is that it is the kind that looks like poetry, which need not mean that it is not the real thing, but is bound to raise a certain ...”

“... turning on a pound of flesh.The pound of flesh brings us in sight of that ‘Tunne of Man’, Sir John Falstaff. I’ve been arguing that, throughout Shakespeare’s developing power of characterisation, the physical has a special place: from Crab the dog to Richard Crookback, then to Bottom, then to the magnificently delineated yet isolated Shylock, and ...”

“... Suffering from depression, he was analysed by the perceptive but corrupt psychotherapist John Layard, who went to bed with him; his father paid for the analysis, and Layard, when Redgrove explained the Game to him, said simply: ‘That’s your mother.’ With its epitaph from Baudelaire – ‘C’est elle! Noire et pourtant ...”

“... Hall, which opened in 1612, was an imposing three-storey house standing at the bottom end of St John’s Street, not far from Smithfield market. When it was built the street had to be rerouted around it, which did not please the residents, and one of the first to appear at the new court was a local apothecary’s wife, Grace Watson, charged with ‘giving ...”

“... He sieved biographies, letters and accounts of those he considered great men – whether John Adams or Confucius – to produce poems with distinct overtones of hero-worship. In politics this tendency led to his admiration for Mussolini, and even to that view of Hitler as ‘a Saint’. While caged in Pisa in the closing days of the war, he set to ...”

“... a pitiful proportion of the eligible vote. The deficiencies of the electoral system are now more gross than ever, while a three-party system – in Scotland and Wales a four-party system – and differential turnouts have introduced a randomness and unpredictability which the overall results conceal. Furthermore, the fall in turnout is as remarkable as the ...”