“... things wrong, as he sometimes does. But Gifford tells us that Edward VII had tattoos, as did George V, as did Nicholas II of Russia and Alphonso XII of Spain, not to speak of Lady Randolph Churchill. Slote, Mamigonian and Turner add that Edward VII ‘received his first tattoo in 1862’, and then give us a source for this, as they generally do. But they ...”

“... to cover and was profoundly re-educated in the process. Here I came into contact with the work of Walter Benjamin, which had a decisive impact on me, as readers of Imagined Communities will immediately recognise. On visits to London, I began to meet the NLR circle and make friends among them. I liked and respected no one more than Tom Nairn, the Scottish ...”

“... is in Blessings, Kicks and Curses) he develops a very just and instructive distinction between Walter Scott, prepared to compromise with his public, and Wordsworth, not so prepared; then realises that this is just the distinction that Leavis would have made and, instead of welcoming Leavis as an ally, marks out his distinction from him by talking of his ...”

“... to settle Europe’s ‘people apart’ in Palestine. In 1916 he became Foreign Secretary in Lloyd George’s coalition Government and in 1917 made the Zionist prescription British policy. The Declaration went to Lord Rothschild on 2 November 1917, when British forces commanded by General Sir Edmund Allenby were overrunning Palestine. ‘Weizmann’s principal ...”

“... Harold and the verse tales, Beatty argues, noticed the opposite: ‘a depth in his thought’, in Walter Scott’s words, a combination of force or intensity with difficult thinking, and a fascination with the question of the intellect’s relationship to the will. You don’t expect it, because the tales are so swashbuckling, so ostensibly about deeds, but ...”

“... his understanding of Marxism. By the 1970s he is writing in New Society about Victor Serge and Walter Benjamin, independent Marxists who were opposed to the Party line or idiosyncratic in their interpretation of Marxist theory. Serge was a former anarchist who was soon expelled from the Party and ended up as a ‘left oppositionist’, disenchanted with ...”

“... pinned to a cushion which Merula, his widow, had embroidered years ago with a flowing tapestry of Walter, A.G.’s favourite dog. Once when A.G. was appearing in the West End Walter was run over by a milk-float and slightly injured. The dog was so loved that this news had to be kept from Alec lest he be unable to take the ...”

“... about Kubrick’s own work with actors. There are magnificent performances in his movies – by George C. Scott, James Mason, Peter Sellers, George Macready, Kirk Douglas, Nicole Kidman, Sterling Hayden; and in smaller roles, Slim Pickens, Peter Ustinov, Sue Lyon, Leonard Rossiter, Shelley Winters, Sydney Pollack – but ...”

“... She was a piano student and was thought to have been in love with Pound’s friend the pianist Walter Rummel. When she met Pound in 1910 she at once offered him financial support to the extent of rather more than half her own small income. He accepted and wrote her grateful letters, from Italy and then from America (‘Dear Miss Cravens’ for a whole ...”

“... lobbies. This, rather than anything to do with Irangate, is the real reason why that CIA Director, George Bush, would probably be no improvement on Reagan as President, and could well be worse. There is little doubt that the fundamental force which put Reagan into office was a growing sense of public unease at American imperial decline. (Already in 1976 Gerald ...”

“... family was wary; important witnesses to her life were squeamish about providing testimony. George Bernard Shaw announced that ‘as Edith was an audaciously unconventional lady and Hubert an exceedingly unfaithful husband he does not see how a presentable biography is possible as yet; and he has nothing to contribute to a mere whitewashing ...”

“... increases in intensity after the burnings of 1526. In 1534, too, he turned on his former associate George Joye who, Greekless, had presumed to revise his translation on the basis of Latin and issue it, playing boo peep, or pissing like a fox in a badger’s sett, as Tyndale put it, to assert territorial rights. He was right to feel indignant. What he had ...”

“... artists who, although not exactly the avantgarde, included Max Liebermann, Ilya Repin and Walter Crane, as well as some of the more academically-inclined veterans of the Salons; while Huysmans, the aesthetic modernist, dabbled in Satanism before becoming a Catholic deeply hostile to theological modernism, and celebrating his conversion to the ...”

“... shift in historical consciousness which elsewhere produced the work of Edward Gibbon and Sir Walter Scott, which makes Malone’s work so important. At the same time, however, it is also what makes his work so confined in critical scope, since for him it makes virtually any critical activity beyond the provision of historical and linguistic glosses seem ...”

“... interested in Taylor’s more orthodox poems, which he valued, as would any good friend of Sir Walter Scott, as a source of quaint details about everyday life in Jacobean London. Malcolm’s proposal of an unbroken, overarching historical trajectory of nonsense stretching from the Renaissance to the Victorians looks equally shaky in the other ...”