“... had said: ‘The opposition to the Georgians was already at the time in question (just after the war) Sitwellism. But the Sitwells belong to the history of publicity rather than of poetry.’ This Osbert hated. His anti-Georgian blasts, his own ‘let us be witty’ satiric verses, Edith’s experiments with ‘image-patterns based, like nursery rhymes, on ...”

“... but there is little evidence that they were. It is the twenty-odd years before the First World War that most catch the eye. This was when the Apostles were something like a recruiting agency for what we loosely call Bloomsbury, but what we ought perhaps to acknowledge as a cultural-cum-political formation of an entirely novel sort. Setting the intellectual ...”

“... and doomed, had to lose. ‘The modern men won,’ the new men like Sherman, advocate of ‘total war’ (the theme that the Civil War is the prototype of later global wars is also a favourite of Warren’s), so different from the gallant Southern generals who led their own troops in person. There is more than a whiff here ...”

“... forfeited funds. We’re nicer, but we’re not One Nation yet. Nevertheless, the undeclared civil war of the last six years seems to have had its effect. In 1981, the only poll that got anywhere near reflecting what actually happened in the Warrington by-election was taken in haste outside the local vodka factory, and it would not be wise to put too much ...”

“... and with the Conquistadores. Contemporary America has no such vital connection with its Civil War, or with its Puritan foundation. Fuentes suggests that the Americans have lost their past by virtue of ancestral sexual timidity. The conquerors of America (unlike those of Mexico) killed, but they did not sufficiently rape. The result was genocide, not ...”

“... explicit political involvement. The suspicion seems to be deeper when it comes to anti-Vietnam war poets such as Bly and Levertov: Pound gets off relatively lightly. Sifting out the good, lyrical bits of the Cantos from the bad, political bits is no way to come properly to terms with Pound’s poetry. The desire ‘to dream the Republic’ is central to ...”

“... living conditions of the less privileged orders of society. Cicero’s presentation of Roman upper-class etiquette as a code of moral duly ran counter to romanticism and individualism. His avowed indebtedness to the thinkers of ancient Greece, to Plato and Aristotle and the philosophers of his own youth, fell foul of the new cult of originality and the new ...”

“... and straightening was given stronger expression in Marx’s prediction that the eradication of class differences and hierarchical power relations would bring the close of history; and there were many who, like Benjamin, rejected the prospect of endless progress in favour of an egalitarian ending. But Marx offered hope for the present rather than the ...”

“... based on Conrad’s last mission at sea. The British government, in the thick of the First World War, had enlisted the ageing celebrity for a brief, hopefully not too dangerous foray in the North Sea to hunt for German U-boats. The trip was undertaken without incident and – as its captain, James Sutherland, recorded – without any great satisfaction ...”

“... less obviously, on weaponising the economy to secure political power: a combination of culture war, patronage and mass clientelism. The specificity of these characteristics tends to be missed by those who equate contemporary right-wing populism with fascism, or see populism as a new ideology, or assume that ‘ordinary people’ brought all this on ...”

“... rates both before and after the Revolution. The suicide rate seems to have dropped during the war years between 1914 and 1921, though in the absence of systematic monitoring, one can’t be sure. But in the 1920s the experts resumed their work, now with more secure professional status and support from the modernising Soviet state, which in its early years ...”

“... Sound​ is war,’ a sound tech I know likes to say. He means that when you try to extend its life, things get messy. Sound is fragile and decays quickly; when you fight that, it can become wild. Plug a bunch of instruments into amplifiers to try to get the sound of a rock and roll band to vibrate in the ears of twenty people in some dirty little club and you have trouble on your hands ...”

“... secret data. At the same time he was educating himself in the disagreeable facts of America’s War on Terror, and the moral and legal implications of the national security state. He was pressed by larger doubts the more he learned. Not all these particulars emerged in the interview, but all could be inferred; and Snowden’s profile differed from that of ...”

“... War was looming when Alexander Korda’s film Fire over England was released in 1937. It stars Flora Robson as Elizabeth I, and as the opening titles roll the voiceover sets the scene: ‘the free people of a small island’ defy the tyranny of a Continental power and ‘a woman guides and inspires them.’ Robson, firm of jaw and bristling with double-decker ruffs and farthingales, outwits the dastardly Spanish and the Armada is defeated ...”

“... between the family members might be a fiction, and that Joseph Skizzen himself might be a Nazi war criminal. Skizzen has been lying about his age for most of his life, and near the book’s end we are told that he has the option ‘to forget the order he had been given by the High Command’. The line can be understood as making a mocking reference to an ...”