“... say a weapon: chicanery.’ And: ‘Smiles are rare in ancient art. Tranquillity was bought at the price of tension and renunciation – hallmarks of the ancient world as much as of the world of the samurai or of Queen Victoria.’ And: ‘The puritanism of the upper class did not rest on sexuality: it rested on sexuality as a possible source of moral ...”

“... mural and inadvertently reveals his defection plan to his assistant Max by offering him a bargain price on his Wartburg. Max tries to dissuade him: ‘Kurt, in the West they don’t even do painting anymore. These days painting is considered bourgeois.’ To which Kurt replies: ‘I thought for them “bourgeois” was good?’ Even if your art exhibits ...”

“... began to produce books. In the library Kazin sometimes sat across from his friend the historian Richard Hofstadter, who was also writing his first book, and their simultaneous composition was also a form of becoming. The battle Kazin had all his writers fight in On Native Grounds was a battle against an uncaring America, a vast industrial civilisation. He ...”

“... wrote about what he could see through his first-floor window: the three protruding masts of the SS Richard Montgomery, an American Liberty ship that ran aground and broke in two in August 1944, a mile and a half off Sheerness beach. The ship was carrying 1400 tonnes of explosives – enough to wipe Sheerness off the map, along with Southend and parts of the ...”

“... Barton, ranging from American luminaries like Jonas Barish and Stephen Orgel to newcomers like Richard Rowland (who contributes a thumpingly good piece on Heywood). Shakespeare is still the most challenging object in the literary canon, the most generous with meaning and, at the same time, the most apt to find out folly in those who would interpret ...”

“... Ionian calm in ‘Un Voyage à Cythère’ – is no more than a faint breeze around the ankles. Richard Aldington, who could often be found sucking where the bee sucks, produced an unfortunate version that does much the same: ‘Now here, now there, as the wind sways, sway we.’ And Peter Dale, always pushed for rhymes, has the bodies on his gibbets turn ...”

“... into the Republican camp, though not all of them formally switched their party registrations. Richard Perle, a leading figure in the Republican defence establishment known as the ‘Prince of Darkness’, remains a registered Democrat. Among the neoconservative Democrats who moved over to join the Reagan administration was Paul Wolfowitz, Donald ...”

“... the Devil, whose opening bid for her soul is a permanent release from the patriarchy (cheap at the price). By Warner’s account, witchcraft was heresy pure and simple: a protest against Christian orthodoxy rather than a religion in its own right. In The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), a book she knew well, Margaret Murray had advanced the far more ...”

“... view of the period, which takes the idea of an English Renaissance to be elitist and aestheticist. Richard Halpern​ knows that European tragedy has often followed the Greeks. His Eclipse of Action starts with an account of the Oresteia and ends with Sarah Kane’s Blasted, a viscerally shocking play which reworks atrocities from tragic tradition. As turning ...”

“... the mystery and miracle of his existence. In his excellent book on the Russian Revolutionary novel Richard Freeborn discusses the many forerunners of Dr Zhivago, and implies, what is certainly the case, that the novels which had sought to come to terms with the new world of the Revolution – Fedin’s Cities and Years, Veresaev’s The Deadlock, Bulgakov’s ...”

“... there would be inflation. One must wait for economies to right themselves. (‘Is it your view,’ Richard Kahn asked Hayek when he came to Cambridge to explain his theory in 1931, ‘that if I went out tomorrow and bought a new overcoat, that would increase unemployment?’ ‘Yes,’ was the reply. Keynes, although he greatly disliked Hayek’s argument, saw ...”

“... by a fig-pecker. (‘If a figpecker could grow as big as a pheasant, it would be worth the price of an acre of land,’ Brillat-Savarin adjudged 19 centuries later, before divulging Canon Charcot’s method of consumption: pull out the gizzard and swallow the bird whole. M.F.K. Fisher calls this recipe ‘brutishly refined’ but admits puzzlement as ...”

“... in Kelly’s account, on the eve of the French Revolution with the Dilettanti’s circulation of Richard Payne Knight’s strikingly illustrated work, A Disquisition on the Worship of Priapus, in 1786. Kelly’s thoughtful if frustrating book is intended to save the Dilettanti from themselves. He seeks to show that they were more than the glamorous Hoorays ...”

“... could be dismissed as not especially consequential. In Volcanoes: Crucibles of Change (1997), Richard Fisher, Grant Heiken and Jeffrey Hulen devote only half a sentence to it: ‘The dust cloud … lasted less than two years, and its effects upon the environment, though harmful to people, were short-lived.’ But Wood, who intends no hyperbole in his ...”

“... between the US and UK to share codebreaking methods. In his history of the Five Eyes system, Richard Kerbaj goes back to 1938, when an MI5 officer decided to tip off the US embassy in London about a minor German plot to steal secrets from an American colonel in New York. After the culprit was arrested, another MI5 officer, Guy Liddell, travelled to the ...”