“... it all: he became involved in the politics of 1848, made a speech attacking the Court, and in May 1849 appeared on the barricades alongside Bakunin. By chance (again) he escaped being imprisoned and thus avoided a likely death sentence. The rest of Mein Leben describes Wagner’s exile, spent mostly in Switzerland, but with interludes in ...”

“... like Iraq for finding themselves automatically lined up on one side of the Cold War. When in May 1946 it had seemed as if the Canal was to go, the Chief of Staff had drawn up a reproachful inventory of all the Middle East countries, showing everywhere except in the Transjordan the uncertainty and fragility of Britain’s situation. Since the ...”

“... proceedings. The Young Spartans is a history painting – it links him directly with Ingres and David – yet the bodies it shows are adolescent, as surely modern children as the rats who later became his models. It challenges the convention of the well-formed statuesque body as the vehicle for the characters of history. When he painted a carriage at the ...”

“... in their prime, as did the playwright Serumaga, who kept oppositional theatre going under Amin. David Rubadiri, then exiled from Malawi, left for Kenya and is now in Botswana. Okello Oculi, poet and political scientist, is in Nigeria. Not one well-known Ugandan creative writer now lives in the country. The Kenyans whom they mixed with at those heady ...”

“... But division is well recorded in Scots from the early 15th century on. It is possible that Lorimer may have thought of his translation as a step towards establishing what linguists call a grapholect, a national written language which is used, as English is, by speakers of a number of different dialects, though no one speaker will draw on all of its lexical ...”

“... in the late Forties, which suggests that Fuchs knew her to be mentally unbalanced. Fuchs may have been abnormal in being able to lock his activities into two watertight compartments and to close his mind to the implications of his spying for the colleagues who trusted him and the country that had given him shelter: but no more abnormal than Anthony ...”

“... hall entertainer. Swooping on a vulnerable target, she broke down any Calvinist inhibitions he may have retained, wrecked his marriage (not without assistance from the man himself) and carried him off to Caxton Hall, where she is supposed to have exclaimed afterwards: ‘I’ve done it! I’ve done it!’ Despite being (allegedly) pushed into an Amsterdam ...”

“... believed that the late work was an inspired adaptation to apparently intolerable conditions: It may be safely said that the curious and unique development of the art of pastel that this obstacle compelled him to evolve would not have come into being but for his affliction. A large scale became a necessity. For the shiny medium of oil paint was substituted ...”

“... for in the family, and which her family so signally fails to develop in her. Be that as it may, she contrives to take an overview of her life across the years without losing a sense of the oddness, partiality and contingency of its shape. One striking example of this is her account of the (de) forming of her sexual life because of an infantile ...”

“... Melbourne spent two winters in Glasgow, living plainly and studying with John Millar, disciple of David Hume and Adam Smith, and one of the most influential proselytisers for the Scottish Enlightenment. This experience gave him a strong commitment to the principles of political economy; it also profoundly influenced his thinking on the relationship between ...”

“... Raine’s poems present something more than a concatenation of metaphors, effective though these may be. They are most effective when drawn from one area of experience, grouped around a single event or figure, or unified by a strong narrative. The tradesmen from the ‘Yellow Pages’ of The Onion, Memory, ‘In the Kalahari Desert’ (for me, his most ...”

“... in the late 1960s, are no longer central to his achievement. Cutting It Short isn’t the David Lodge novel that its English title seems to promise; indeed, one of the things that is to be docked – twice, and excruciatingly – by the heroine, who happens to be Hrabal’s mother, Marie, is the tail of a dog. This was the 1920s, and suddenly ...”

“... still in his twenties Fried had become a leading critic of contemporary art, an occupation which may not sound very different from being an art historian, though perhaps less respectable. Yet from Baudelaire onwards, an engagement with contemporary painting has been vital to some of the greatest poets; and the best art critics, aside from those who were ...”

“... of Milanese mercenaries he had stationed outside the city. As the Pazzi now discovered, Lorenzo may have been young, but he was as hardheaded a warrior as the mercenaries among whom he had grown up: the handsome brutes Galeazzo Maria Sforza of Milan and Sigismondo Malatesta of Rimini. For the next ten years, Lorenzo would contrive savage revenge on his ...”

“... assessment of the peculiarity of a locally rooted mini-sect. And yet, insignificant as they may be, the fortunes of this small, quarrelsome, fissiparous and yet cohesive group on the edge of the cataclysms of the 1930s and 1940s shine small beams of light into its darkness. Most of Davis’s book naturally deals with this phase of their development. The ...”