“... and painstaking scholarship is used to try and dislodge it. Of course, Solomon’s Mozart is a far more sympathetic figure than Hildesheimer’s, but Solomon is also a more attractive advocate of the good Mozart than Hildesheimer is of the dysfunctional. Solomon loves Mozart and writes about him with a certain ...”

“... Cassandra somewhat backhandedly, suggesting that her weeding-out and censorship ‘shows itself more in the complete destruction of letters rather than in the excision of individual sentences; the “portions cut out” usually only amount to a very few words, and from the context it would seem that the subject concerned was physical ailment.’ Le Faye ...”

“... rougher extramural suburb of St Giles). These are community connections. But what else – what more specifically – has drawn him into this prosecution, and into the rather murky story that lies behind it? This new material about Mountjoy does not impinge directly on Shakespeare, who had not lived at his house for some years, and who is anyway not ...”

“... the proportioning of Moody’s biography is misguided. In this new third volume he devotes more space to Pound’s last decade, during which he wrote and said little, than he gives in Vol. I to Pound’s first twenty years. It’s worth bearing in mind, for example, that he was born at the end of a century when hundreds of American institutions had ...”

“... suspicious of the swift and brash generalisations that stole the headlines a decade and more ago. Collinson has written two earlier major works, one on Elizabethan Puritanism, the other a life of Edmund Grindal, Elizabeth’s defiant Archbishop of Canterbury. Here he moves forward into the reign of James I. This has been the dark period of the ...”

“... of travel between the Indian and the Greek worlds, but specialists would probably demand more detailed evidence, notably with respect to the earliest influence. My concern, however, is limited to his arguments for Buddhism as a solution to current intellectual and moral problems. Le Bonheur-Liberté is an exceptional work by most criteria. Its author ...”

“... bones of the cotton weavers were bleaching the plains of India.’ Tariffs of 70 per cent and more were imposed on the textiles India produced, and cheap British cottons flooded the Indian market. Bishop Heber, that acute observer and author of the lines ‘though every prospect pleases, and only man is vile’, reported that ‘the peasantry in the ...”

“... not in outright exile. Günter Grass’s new novel, Eine weites Feld, proposes another solution, a more radical and scandalous one. The scandal predictably aroused the outrage of all those (and they were and are many) who thought that politics could now be abandoned once and for all, and that in Germany, as elsewhere in the world, after the alleged triumph of ...”

“... was ‘the year everybody in the United States was worried about homosexuality’. And nobody was more worried than the federal government, which was rumoured to be teeming with gays and lesbians. One might think that Washington’s attentions would have been focused elsewhere – on the Soviet Union, for example, or on Communist spies – but in ...”

“... writing poetry can blight the exercise of other talents, talents that might have led to success in more orthodox careers. Coleridge had, according to Eliot, been ‘visited by the Muse’ during his early manhood, but, the visitor having departed, he was ‘thenceforth a haunted man’. He had a talent for metaphysics and similar studies, but ‘he was ...”

“... in horrid nakedness’. Occasionally, he sees a little cornfield, which only serves ‘to impress more strongly the general barrenness’. As if to silence these romantic terrors, Johnson plays the calm 18th-century surveyor, and in portly periods begins an inquiry into the loch’s dimensions: Loch Ness is about 24 miles long and from one mile to two miles ...”

“... region had plenty of liberals, but a category that includes both Miranda – who corresponded with Thomas Paine, participated in the American and French Revolutions and led Venezuela’s break from Spain – and Porfirio Díaz, Mexico’s strongman for around 30 years at the turn of the 20th century, is as volatile as the politics that the term ...”

“... easier in the United States than to accuse a black man of crime.’The same could be said today, more than half a century after the end of legal segregation. In 1989 five black and Latino teenagers, described by the police as a pack of ‘wilding’ youths, were wrongfully convicted of the assault and rape of a white female jogger in Central Park. Donald ...”

“... for contempt against him for his failure to answer the first one. There was still no response. More orders followed, each threatening consequences more severe than the one before if Hunnyngs refused to answer the writ and produce Witherley. Released at last, Witherley in 1605 applied for fresh attachments against his ...”

“... had been put away for the night.’ Over the centuries the miracle courtyards swelled with more honest indigents; they became known as cités – a word associated nowadays with public housing projects – but Sante’s coterie of ne’er-do-wells remained in charge. In Notre-Dame de Paris, Hugo described a typical cité as a ‘monstrous ...”