“... Frogs shows Dionysus going to Hades to fetch him back after his death; Athenian prisoners-of-war in Sicily are said to have got food and water from their captors by singing his songs. Frogs suggests that his magic lay, at least partly, in emotionalism coupled with a new use of the fictional female voice. Bronze Age Greece could not escape Cretan ...”

“... well in the 1930s, but whose development, as MacNeice explains in a note, ‘is interrupted by the war . . . Subsequent interruptions and frustrations include those occasioned by the lure of commercial art, by drink, money troubles and women.’ Hence the title of the play. Hank (an anagram of Khan) might have built a stately pleasure dome, but instead he ...”

“... public meetings were worthy of Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign. Although the Falklands War brought this period of euphoria to a close, morale in the Alliance remained high. It was against such inflated expectations that the result of the 1983 General Election was judged. With 25.4 per cent of the vote in the United Kingdom compared to Labour’s ...”

“... pervades this autobiography, as it proceeds from an account of Eysenck’s boyhood in post-World War One Germany, through his flight to England out of repugnance at Hitler, and sub-sequent rapid rise as a psychologist. His earliest conscious memory is of winning the judge’s admiration in a seaside sandcastle competition, and the second is of his ...”

“... her other passing assertions, such as the allusions to ‘falling Zeppelins’ in the First World War, or to the ‘diesel Saabs’ of present-day yuppies. Who is Dora, anyway? We are invited to think of her both as typing away in the attic of 49 Bard Road with filing-cabinet, card index and word-processor, and as a gin-sodden hag pouring out her story to ...”

“... an altogether more serious view of the Swedes. They had a big bank behind them; they had first-class London advisers; and they had good reason to pay a hefty premium for a foothold in the EC in advance of 1992. We knew that £5.20 would only be a sighting shot, and that however vigorous our defence we might have to consider seriously the level of price at ...”

“... They live in a society where literature, art and music are available in abundance ... in which the class barriers that once strangled social mobility are gone. Mr Major’s property-owning democracy, it turns out, is crammed, not just with cars and videos, but with works of literature and paintings too. Mrs Thatcher’s vision of homes fit for Tories ...”

“... rule imposed by the Germans after 1907 and taken over by the Belgians in 1919. The ‘ruling class’ required by the doctrine of indirect rule had of course to be the Tutsi. As cattle-chiefs and lineage headmen their spokesmen were already accustomed to thinking of themselves as superior to the Hutu. But the needs of indirect rule transformed an ...”

“... accountants. As Italy struggles to emerge from its deepest recession since the Second World War, almost the only film in production on the Rome back-lots is a spoof of Jurassic Park. To its backers, the chief attraction of this remake is that the species to be reconstituted from primeval amber is the relatively unexotic chicken. Outside the ...”

“... versions of London scenes for the lucrative art market, nor a Hogarth, using a far different class of scenes to stir the dormant social conscience of his time. He was not a Shepherd or a Boys either, bent on spreading the good word that ‘metropolitan improvements’ – the upbeat title of a book by James Elmes which Shepherd illustrated – were ...”

“... charm of Lenya, on stage and off. She was born Karoline Charlotte Blamauer, in a working-class district of Vienna, to a long-suffering battered mother and a father who resented the death of his first child (who had also been called Karoline). Lenya – her first name was developed out of a Viennese diminutive of her first name – was allegedly a ...”

“... Fascists, the exhibition plays down the dominating presence of Communists in the arts since the war. Rather than all that Sironi, there might have been more of Guttuso. His attempt to create an epic art in a demotic language was one of the bravest enterprises in modern painting, and its failures are rarely uninteresting. Guttoso’s pictures here all date ...”

“... functions like a morbid conspiracy. Like him, she has written again and again about lower-middle-class gentility (rural Canadian rather than urban English), and its self-obsessed obedience. Like his stories, Munro’s are fat with community: her characters steal their lean solitude from the thickness that surrounds them. These thieves struggle against the ...”

“... are all too susceptible; good counsel to which they are deaf. The story indicts equally a ruling class and a nation which have failed their own tests of public virtue. Arcadia, like Elizabethan England, is in a perilous condition. The death or threatened death of the irresponsible ruler will lead to a violently disputed succession and civil ...”

“... literary essays. The Cambridge English Tripos had been set up in the aftermath of the First World War. Its leading figures were deeply moved by the Modernist ferment of the times. I.A. Richards was not only a pioneering literary theorist but one of the earliest interpreters of Eliot’s poetry. F.R. Leavis championed Eliot, Pound and D.H. Lawrence, and taught ...”