“... an exhilarating place to imagine they’d found it, even though it would soon be in ruins. They took up propaganda work with the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, a not quite Trotskyist party of which Trotsky himself was fiercely critical. The POUM’s members (including a number of its leaders) were drawn from the Left and Right Opposition to the ...”

“... were often, therefore, scarcely-veiled solidarities between rich and poor in Italian society. They took different forms, certainly, in north and south, town and country, but from the state’s point of view they all represented a challenge to its authority and therefore, by definition, to the rule of law. By the 1880s it was widely believed in Italy that no ...”

“... book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), the poem shows Sexton’s craft, honed with advice from John Holmes, W.D. Snodgrass and Robert Lowell. Retrieved at the last moment from her ‘bone pile’ of discards to fill out the book, it had gone through 19 drafts before Sexton achieved what Middlebrook calls the ‘double “I” ’ of the stanza and ...”

“... and the friends she acquired for herself and met through her first marriage, to publisher John Rodker, she could within reason command whatever pulpit, platform or stage she needed. Once free of the security and conventions of her home and the violent claims that the countryside all around it made on her emotions, and having then sloughed off her ...”

“... from a kind of generalised Darwinism. More original is the assertion that Woolf ‘remembers’ John Tyndall’s work on light and heat when describing the colour of the sky as ‘the blue that has escaped registration’ (Between the Acts) – Tyndall having established in the 1870s that the blue of the sky was distance, not colour. The very structure of ...”

“... of State for Foreign Affairs. That was fully up to the level of prickliness displayed by John Thadeus Delane, editor of the Times, in his famous exchange with Lord Derby over the accession to power of Napoleon III 28 years earlier, and serves to show that, even if the Standard had allowed its financial independence to be corrupted, it never permitted ...”

“... attempts to mollify Bloom for having cruelly depicted her in his novel Deception; the review by John Updike of Operation Shylock that drives Roth to commit himself to a psychiatric hospital, suffering from a nervous breakdown; the arsenal of psychotropics (Lithium, Halcion, Xanax, Valium, Prozac) used to calm the couple’s respective nervous systems as ...”

“... revolutionists with a schema. The pervasive influence of Country publicists like Thomas Gordon, John Trenchard, Bolingbroke and Benjamin Hoadly on colonial pamphleteers is now taken for granted. American historians have tested Bailyn’s thesis by extending and particularising it. This is what T.H. Breen has done in Tobacco Culture. The impact of Country ...”

“... creative process. Steichen’s photographs, which were so revealing of Rodin’s intentions, also took the work into a timeless world. His ‘Balzac’, for instance, isolated against the moonlit sky, is, like the interpretation of a musical score, a work of art made from a work of art. Photography allowed both the activity of making sculpture – the changes ...”

“... from science. The 18th century, the author would have us believe, conveniently turning his back on John Ray and that brilliant company of contemporaries in the later decades of the previous century, was the first age in which nature came under close scientific observation. That Professor Charlton is unsure of his footing on such ground is revealed by the ...”

“... once more up to the little old ruined chapel, by the bridge – she may remember – where we took shelter in a thunderstorm. This is because she is part of the Past, while Ladies This, That and the Other are of this present time which wearies me ...1 Browning did not idealise this ‘Past’, but felt it as a passion of love and suffering; however ...”

“... but a man with an even greater problem, a mistaken view of art and literature, which he wrongly took to be important in proportion to its social and political implications. Each thought the rightness of his views self-evident: Nabokov maintained this with serious gaiety, Wilson with stubbornness. An instance of the latter is the critic’s attitude to what ...”

“... the presence of ideologues, and reading between the lines one can see why the hard men of polities took care to keep him at arm’s length. From the historian’s point of view Amery was not a model diarist. He began too late to record the inside history of the Tariff Reform League, and from 1906 to l922 often fell down on the job, leaving large gaps in the ...”

“... to write voluminous books. Becoming a Fellow of Churchill College somewhat late in the day, he took charge of the archive which he and the college were accumulating and made it among the leading assemblages of documents on contemporary affairs in this country. Roskill was a man of sweet temper. After the peacefulness of Naval life he was at first surprised ...”

“... Graham of the Washington Post. He was the incandescent man. Phil Graham walked into a room and took it over, charming and seducing whomever he wished, men and women alike. No one in Washington could match him at it, not even, in the days before he became President, John F. Kennedy. He was handsome and slim and when he ...”