“... to whom all sorts of rumour could be attributed, a twisted figment of the public’s imagination. Martin Doherty makes it clear in Nazi Wireless Propaganda (2000) that outbreaks of Haw-Haw scare stories recurred throughout the war, at moments of maximum stress: after the defeats of 1942, during the air-raids of that year, and with the first use of flying ...”

“... work had been recognised more pragmatically on the frontier itself, where in 1764 the explorer Thomas Morris, venturing into what is now Illinois, discovered to his surprise not only that he was not the first anglophone to have got so far west but that the locals already knew exactly how much the crown jewels of his culture were worth: ‘An Indian ...”

“... women.’ These themes were taken up in the Republic’s early modern descendants, the utopias of Thomas More and Tommaso Campanella. In Utopia, a naked bride and groom are inspected for flaws before their wedding, on the explicit model of buying a horse. In Campanella’s City of the Sun, the Solarians laugh at ordinary humans ‘who exhibit a studious care ...”

“... scrambling movie decade that gave us Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, there was nary a murmur from her (just imagine what she might have made of Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky). We know from Nunez and others that Sontag boogied in Studio 54, and yet where was her disco inferno deep-think? Disco as tribal ecstasy ...”

“... they protect, it could be a forerunner to the far more radical global tax on capital proposed by Thomas Piketty as a way to ease the extremes of inequality built into the capitalist system. The idea goes back at least to Keynes. But the fact modern supporters chose to name it after the legendary hero of Sherwood Forest is a marker of how popular thinking ...”

“... currency for every Eurozone country,’ the French economist Michel Aglietta and his co-author, Thomas Brand, write in Un New Deal pour l’Europe. ‘It binds them to rigidly fixed exchange rates, regardless of their underlying economic realities, and strips them of monetary autonomy.’ For Aglietta, a currency is essentially a social contract: behind it ...”

“... The rest of the article is Graham Greene chasing Fidel Castro all over Cuba, the way his Holly Martin pursued Harry Lime all over Vienna in The Third Man. He doesn’t know yet that his Caribbean hero is actually the villain of the piece. Greene writes about Celia Sanchez, a feminine factotum of Castro’s, and Haydée Santamaria, a professional procer of ...”

“... sketch shows then demanded a musical interlude between items, Kathy Kirby, say, or Millicent Martin. Boldly (as we thought) we opted for poems instead and were considered very eccentric, but Frank Muir, then head of comedy, and David Attenborough, the controller of BBC2, said it was all right and so we filmed Palmers to illustrate Larkin’s ...”

“... introduced to by a friend. Each piece has a picture at the top drawn by the illustrator Charles Martin in the style of a fashion shoot. The words and music stand in for captions. ‘Le Golf’, for example, tells a story about a cocky colonel’s comeuppance on the links:The colonel is wearing shocking green ‘Scotch Tweed’.He will be victorious.His ...”

“... produced unpredictable surges that were seen in every insurgent city. ‘Fear,’ wrote Emile Thomas, the architect of the National Workshops in Paris and later a zealous Bonapartist, ‘has been the presiding emotion of our revolution.’Liberal leaders feared they might be unable to control the social energies released by the revolution. People of ...”

“... and published in November 1985, which is the most objective and well-documented account; also on Martin Walker’s book With Extreme Prejudice,* which provides considerably more, and more recent, information on the harassment, as well as a more radical political evaluation of the events. The long-promised report of the Avon and Somerset team, amounting to ...”

“... Cathedral, Londonderry, of Gráinne, daughter of Northern Ireland’s Education Minister Martin McGuinness (not yet knighted for his varied public services, but it’s early days), and Sean ‘Harpie’ Hargan, the Derry football hero. The TV wasn’t there, we thought wistfully, to cover us, or the long-running story that had brought us back to ...”

“... between ‘When the evening is spread out against the sky’ (line 2 of ‘Prufrock’) and Thomas Hardy’s ‘forms there flung/Against the sky’ (‘The Abbey Mason’); between ‘certain half-deserted streets’ (line 4 of ‘Prufrock’) and ‘he sought out a certain street and number’ in Chapter 20 of Little Dorrit; or, moving beyond ...”

“... Caesar. His death. I always did whenever I read biographies. Because of course they all die. Thomas Alva Edison. Henry Ford. Benjamin Franklin. Marie Curie. Florence Nightingale. Winston Churchill. Louis Armstrong. Theodore Roosevelt.’‘You read Theodore Roosevelt’s biography when you were a kid?’‘I did, yes. There was a series. About twenty of ...”

“... to make anachronistic judgments and ask anachronistic questions is hard to avoid. Why didn’t Thomas Mann come out? Why didn’t Forster publish Maurice in 1914, when he wrote it? Why didn’t the American critic F.O. Matthiessen write a history of gay American writing? How come Lionel Trilling didn’t realise that Forster was gay? And why are gay lives ...”