“... to a plump dealer in smuggled tribal art who purred smoothly over the elegance of a cannibals’ war club, and he meditates at length on the demand for Sung dynasty spitoons and Meissen bedpans. In his discussion of the altered environment of religious art Alsop gives us a previously unpublished quatrain by Dorothy Parker on a picture given by William ...”

“... parallel suggested by Frame’s description of analysis as a form of creative writing class), or even his thoughts on cultures in Moses and Monotheism: a society needs victims before it can have a literature. The process of becoming a writer is thus a more fundamental subject of the autobiography than the experiences Frame had in ...”

“... had undertaken the task neglected for so long by Englishmen, found the papers after the end of the war in a state of decomposition and disintegration. He had to piece together charred, torn and rotting fragments. Much has gone beyond recall. But the first volume of a major work shared by him and Professor McClelland is promised, to be finished in ...”

“... There is Mr Kendal’s passion for acting, and there is India, to which he first went during the war, at the age of 30, with his actress wife Laura to work for ENSA, and where he spent most of the next thirty years, bringing his daughters Jennifer and Felicity into the company he formed. In 1985, after the tragic death of Jennifer – married to the Indian ...”

“... hollow men, the inhabitants of death’s dream kingdom, are not a doomed generation or a special class of poètes maudits – they are simply unredeemed humanity; their lovelessness is merely the human condition unirradiated by grace. The lost love (la figlia che piange, hyacinth girl) of the earlier poems, who never showed any very powerful symptoms of ...”

“... journalist Hutchins Hapgood was asked to speak on what Mabel called ‘Sex Antagonism’, that war between man and woman that she so well understood, and a stenographer was hired to record the conversation. But Hutch was a little drunk when he rose to speak, and the stenographer was not used to his vocabulary or odd juxtapositions. The resulting typescript ...”

“... all were that Broughton had managed to get off chiefly because the members of the British upper class stuck together so closely at times of crisis. True, they shot each other in the ear from time to time, but that was clearly a different matter from having the common hangman come along and string up one of their own. Considering how irremediably ...”

“... and Carnival, civil disturbance in a Dauphiné city and countryside, merging into civil war in the period of the Wars of Religion. The English of the translations is vivid, often brilliant, probably with direct intervention from the author, whose command of the language is considerable. All three books display a critical intelligence and wide ...”

“... young men at Oxford were reported to light their cigars with five-pound notes. During the last war, American officers in London nightclubs were also said to favour this method, and more recently, in various underdeveloped countries, we are told that the wealthy have been seen to impress the indigenous poor by this same eccentric display of contempt for the ...”

“... and live in the way that ‘we’ do. Salmond rightly tells us much about the disease, poverty, war, brutality and class conflict that existed in Early Modern European culture; and the point is not that these characteristics were probably absent in pre-contact Polynesia, but that we cannot escape reading them as judgments ...”

“... be a spy. Another spur, this, to enlistment. And if he really was British, where did he fit in the class set-up? Was he a clubland gent up from the shires or was he a big-city chancer, all airs and no substance? Ford’s fictional heroes are usually well-acred but unworldly and he would certainly have wished to be like them. In the matter of money, was he a ...”

“... was just 18 years old. It begins: Hello mother! It’s your eldest son back from the nuclear war, well, half of me anyway. How are you mother? Oh it’s good to see you too, considering the fact that your little darling only has one eye now. ‘Army’ may not be a very good poem but it’s altogether preferable to the sentimental sludge and slurry of ...”

“... Rob Roy: Dickson McCunn, the Glasgow merchant of Hunting-tower and Castle Gay, is not in the same class of invention, sympathy or wit as Nicol Jarvie; and none of John Buchan’s heroines is in the same universe as Diana Vernon. As for comparison with Stevenson, one need merely look at the first chapters of Prester John and Treasure Island. But John ...”

“... central focus and aspires to reinterpret them. Hilary Mantel’s evidently falls into the second class, her protagonists being Danton, Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins, together with Desmoulins’s wife Lucile. Out of her novelist’s imagination she has lavishly furnished these personages with passions and motives and emotional entanglements; and since ...”

“... which Huizinga reads as a living-in-the-past, an escape from the brutalities of 15th-century war. In 1984 Maurice Keen, incidentally a strong admirer of Huizinga, showed with conviction in his Chivalry that the mythology of knighthood had a more positive function: that of softening the brutalities. Again, take the witch craze. Obedient to contemporary ...”