“... more than her mother. She studied at the Slade under the all-powerful trinity of Frederick Brown, Wilson Steer and Tonks. It was 1910, and the students were advised not to attend Roger Fry’s Post-Expressionist exhibition. By 1914 Carrington, a mild bohemian, had cut her hair short, Mark Gertler and C.W. Nevinson were in love with her, and the world outside ...”

“... 19 entered Leeds University, where he encountered modern art in the form of pictures by Gauguin, Wilson Steer, Augustus John, William Nicholson, and woodcuts by Kandinsky, collected by the University’s Vice-Chancellor. Frank Rutter, curator of Leeds Art Gallery, completed the boy’s artistic education. He had already begun to write poems, in free verse ...”

“... best that can be said on behalf of Mr Derek Pattinson, the Secretary-General of the Synod, and Mr James Shelley, the Secretary to the Church Commissioners, who passed Dr Bennett’s essay for publication, is that they may have been lulled into a sense of false security by the nature of the notably anodyne Preface contributed by Dr David Edwards, the present ...”

“... debated socialism with Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells … became the éminence grise to Woodrow Wilson’s own alter ego, Colonel House’), the presidents, kings and leaders he knew, the great events he witnessed at very close quarters, the papers, books and journals he produced, the careers he espoused or helped, the ideas, issues, problems he encountered ...”

“... There need have been no obstacle so far as confidentiality was concerned. Foreign policy, which James I was so adamant about keeping to himself as ‘the royal mystery’, was still everywhere the preserve of very small, exclusive circles. In London scarcely more than a dozen men knew where British policy was really going, or drifting. Parliament and public ...”

“... Monarchy of Austria-Hungary) and now has, in English, an almost entirely new oeuvre to the one James Wood wrote about here soon after he died (and I wrote about in the TLS).* For a dead foreign writer to be allowed to carry on in this way is, to say the least, rather unusual. At that time, Wood wrote about a great comic writer, and I about a man whose best ...”

“... to watch the execution – hideously prolonged by an inexperienced hangman – of John Gleeson Wilson. Many of the audience had come on trains specially laid on for the spectacle. Then there were the bare-knuckle boxing trains, a way to evade the ban on such fights: it was, Bradley writes, as if ‘British Rail had laid on special trains to the Ecstasy ...”

“... people thought that there was something too convenient about the Lusitania for President Woodrow Wilson, and too easy about Pearl Harbour for President Franklin Roosevelt – both of these, incidentally, hypotheses which later Churchill historians are finding harder to dismiss – but such arguments had been subsumed in the long withdrawing roar of American ...”

“... was less amenable to ‘modern theories’ – Ray meant psychologising approaches, of the Edmund Wilson kind. Subsequent biographers have tended to fine-tune, amplify or judiciously correct Ray’s version. No one has, or ever will, supersede him. Margaret Forster in 1978 attempted an imaginary autobiography. Ann Monsarrat’s brisk Thackeray: An Uneasy ...”

“... cognoscenti fled the parboiled American plains for the amenities of English civil life. Henry James dined out on transatlantic discrepancies until they nearly killed him and to this day there is still a kind of American for whom England is an America. But increasingly, these are the disoriented few. Something that never really was – money springs to ...”

“... occasion that now seems significant, for a German-American who publicly called President Woodrow Wilson ‘a cock-sucker and a thief’.) Soon fully-enrolled in the FBI’s predecessor Bureau of Information, Hoover was well-placed when Attorney General Palmer launched his crusade of postwar repression and deportation. He took personal credit for the ...”

“... and took a corresponding relish in the failures of others. She could be unkind: she told Angus Wilson at a vulnerable moment that his publishers had gone bankrupt when they hadn’t. People now tend to assume that the war novels, which Manning began immediately after The Doves of Venus, were immediately and unanimously hailed as masterpieces, but they had ...”

“... theatre in which tier on tier of streets look out across the estuary to the mountains. Not only James Watt, but many painters, novelists and poets began here. After utter collapse, small citizens’ groups are trying to rub the old town back to life, to restore hope: a new theatre, the restoration of the huge ropeworks factory, a protest (why use cobbles ...”

“... Conrad but does little to characterise him as a writer.At the Architectural Review in the 1930s, James Richards had found editing Pevsner’s articles hard work. By the end of the war he was fluent, but his use of English retains a sense of discovery and the flexibility of a mature intellect expressing itself with the vitality of youth. Pevsner was still ...”

“... and even lover that places Marx in the company of ‘Keats, Dickens, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence’. Marxist thought and the Modernist tradition converge for Berman, as both try to grasp and confront the modern experience: Marx’s ‘new-fangled men ... as much the invention of modern time as machinery ...”