“... sister Renée in 1929. The work that their father put in at the department store, Lubow writes, ‘took place mostly out of the children’s view’. But ‘the attention that Gertrude devoted to herself they witnessed daily. Mrs Nemerov typically stayed in bed in the morning past 11 o’clock, smoking cigarettes, talking on the telephone, and applying cold ...”

“... she told her husband, angry that he wouldn’t take care of her the way that Leonard Woolf took care of his wife. ‘That’s one thing I shall grudge Virginia all her days – that she & Leonard were together.’ Mansfield thought that if only she’d had Woolf’s life (‘her roof over her – her own possessions round her – and her man somewhere ...”

“... artist who never earned much money. Her mother, Marijama, ran a boarding house for other painters, took in washing, and made sure that the girls acquired the means to earn their own living: hairdressing, shorthand typing and, in Helen’s case, massage. They were very close, but the family had few resources to draw on in trying to cope with what happened in ...”

“... and security, that we can recognise how weird those years really were. The importance of John Lewis Gaddis’s book is that it is the first coherent and sustained attempt to write the Cold War’s history since it ended. That alone makes it hard to resist, but it is also wise and imaginative and written in a vigorous, simple English which is a ...”

“... protective suavity, the counterfeit of impeccable logic or a minute calibration of fashion. John Berryman once said to a friend: ‘Doesn ‘t reading Stendhal make you feel intelligent!’ The same is true of Hazlitt; and the justified praise of Paulin’s book is that the compliment to our amour-propre survives his exploration to a generous ...”

“... was over, and therefore of little concern. Fatefully, as Gurminder Bhambra and John Holmwood show, this was also the way many non-European peoples were seen: as relics to be overhauled or replaced.The hundred-year period that began around 1870 also witnessed the birth and growth of sociology, the discipline most preoccupied with ...”

“... illusion that Burke was the lackey of the rich and powerful. From first to last, he stuck up for John Wilkes and the cause of liberty. He drily recognised Wilkes’s failings: ‘There has been no hero of the mob but Wilkes’; ‘He is not ours, and if he were, is little to be trusted. He is a lively agreeable man, but of no prudence and no ...”

“... exercises in persuasion, adjust his convictions, and perhaps distort them, to tactical ends. John Aubrey, a friend, wrote that Marvell was ‘of very few words’, and that though he stoked his muse with wine he was careful not to give himself away by drinking in company. Yet he had a violent temper which got him into humiliating trouble in the Commons ...”

“... gives a view of the presidency as seen from the private quarters (where most of the recordings took place) rather than the West Wing, and it turns out that as seen from the private quarters the West Wing barely registers. Of course, that may have been the point of these conversations, which Clinton set up with his old friend Branch (they had been roommates ...”

“... instructed by persons in higher rank to stand there, hold this leash, look at the camera, and they took pictures for PsyOps. I didn’t really, I mean, want to be in any pictures. I thought it was kind of weird.’ Detainees 27, 30 and 31 were stripped of their clothing, handcuffed together nude, placed on the ground, and forced to lie on each other and ...”

“... whose disadvantages are not only social or physical but cognitive. The volume Dog Fox Field (1990) took its title from a Nazi test for mental function; the title poem is an angry elegy for the ‘feebleminded’: These were no leaders but they were first into the dark on Dog Fox Field: Anna who rocked her head, and Paul who grew big and yet giggled small, Irma ...”

“... note’, in which the dramatist is reported as saying that Christ enjoyed carnal relations with John, the beloved disciple, and that all men who did not love tobacco and boys were fools, Marlowe’s own bias seems unusually clear. Sexual relations between man and man (or man and beast) became a capital offence in England in 1533. Demoted briefly to the ...”

“... and Auden himself evidently felt he had been knocked about a bit. ‘Desmond MacCarthy took me to task severely,’ he told a young admirer back home in New York: ‘He’s the Grand Old Man of English criticism … now the publishers over there are advertising it as “that controversial volume”.’ Auden had endured controversy anyway since his ...”

“... and practice, and about the herd instincts of the City of London, as accurate today as when he took over the magazine a century and a half ago. The Memoirs of Walter Bagehot is an oddity, for Bagehot left behind no memoir when his chronically weak chest finally undid him at the age of 51. Instead, Frank Prochaska has stitched together this self-portrait ...”

“... into a full-blown paranoid belief that the security services were plotting a coup against him. John Major was not far behind. He would leave a cabinet discussion to go and read the latest edition of the Evening Standard in the anteroom, then come back to suggest they begin the discussion again in the light of what the Standard was saying. In his memoirs he ...”