“... Cold War promise of apocalypse has been kicked away only to uncover rampant nationalism and what Robert Lowell called ‘small war on the heels of small war’. Our destiny seems to lurk in terrorist outrages and unstoppable new viruses, in the city homeless, in ecological disasters like Chernobyl and Bhopal, in rising world temperatures and evaporating ...”

“... also skirts the actual teaching of the subject in the universities. Nor is he convinced by Robert Crawford’s claim that English literature as an academic field was ‘invented’ in the universities of Enlightenment Scotland, where in 1762 Hugh Blair became the first incumbent of the Regius Chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh. According ...”

“... the conflict as simply a war for Southern independence, and celebrate the grandeur of its heroes. Robert E. Lee was an Olympian figure, always described as ‘magnificent’ by English visitors, and Stonewall Jackson was a martyr – to what it was not clear. Jackson’s death evoked an outpouring of sympathy and admiration from the entire British ...”

“... rollicking Irish Catholic clan, athletic, photogenic and as rambunctious as any crowd of kids in a Frank Capra film. They are presided over by Joseph Kennedy, a fabulously successful self-made father with connections in Hollywood, Wall Street, Washington and London, and by Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, a devout but fashionable Catholic mum, as at home on the golf ...”

“... two women to be admitted to the Irish Republican Brotherhood. After the Rising was suppressed, Robert, her father, narrowly escaped the firing squad, and was in Lewes Prison when Maeve was born. Her childhood was punctuated by raids from ‘unfriendly men dressed in civilian clothes carrying revolvers’; they were looking for her father, who was often on ...”

“... synthesis of naked commerce and organic architecture’ as foreseen by Louis Sullivan, mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright. The basic unit of the skyscraper is the ‘cell’: ‘We take our cue from the individual cell, which requires a window with its separating pier, its sill and lintel, and we, without more ado, make them look all alike because they are all ...”

“... 1950s, Browning’s Kentish Sir Byng reappeared as Ezra Pound’s ‘Duke Liu’: Duke Liu, the frank, unhoused, unhapped, from bound to bourne put all barned corn in sacks and ration bags for glorious use, stretched bow showed shield, lance, dagger-axe and squared to the open road. Of course the Browningesque cadences are not replicated; they are a murmur ...”

“... on Ministry of Labour notepaper. Exactly how Macleod’s marriage worked is a question which Robert Shepherd is far too respectful to answer. Inevitably, Macleod’s wit and somewhat dissolute charm appealed far more to Tory selection committees than did Powell’s heavy earnestness, hunting pink or no. In 1948 Macleod was selected for the safe seat of ...”

“... which was radical in 1965, is uncontroversial today and we now know that it was even held by Robert McNamara at the very time he was ordering the carpet-bombing of Vietnam. Now here’s the interesting thing. Gingrich opposed the war and took a draft deferment every bit as opportunist as Clinton’s. He also supported the Martin Luther King movement, and ...”

“... Poems (1932), Reconstruction (1933) – as Georgian, countryside-centred and influenced by Robert Bridges, changing swiftly to Auden’s ‘manifesto manner’ for Difficult Morning (also 1933). I am not sure about this, especially the implicit conflict between country and town: Swingler always seems to inhabit either with ease. Certainly, he inclined ...”

“... collections that have recently appeared in paperback, Martin Amis’s The War against Cliché and Frank Kermode’s Pleasing Myself. That’s a tough poker table to ask anyone to sit at, and it’s impressive that some of Hitchens’s best pieces, or at least some of his best paragraphs, don’t seem out of place. It’s true that he is quite often doing ...”

“... of Stalingrad. Shtrum has a close circle of scientist friends, with whom he has slightly too frank conversations which he later regrets, and there is a question about whether some of his circle are provocateurs or informers; but when he does get into trouble it is because the state is beginning its turn to anti-semitism. Shtrum has made a theoretical ...”

“... to reinvent himself with every press interview) and those of his friend, the conductor and writer Robert Craft, who has passed off much of his own prose as the composer’s, and whose custodianship of the Stravinsky legacy Walsh regards as dubious. Then there is the mystifying role of Russia, where the Stravinsky archives were so long inaccessible, and whose ...”

“... 1938, Hahn wrote a letter to Meitner reporting this puzzling result. She and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, who later became professor of what the local Cambridge paper called Unclear Physics, realised that the uranium nucleus had split in two with the release of a prodigious amount of energy, and first coined the term ‘nuclear fission’. In April ...”

“... he sat through the Dardenne brothers’ Rosetta, Bruno Dumont’s L’Humanité and seven films by Robert Bresson. It was the summer I learned the word ‘austere’.My taste, or at least my appetite, was indiscriminate. As Pauline Kael wrote in 1969, ‘when you’re young the odds are very good that you’ll find something to enjoy in almost any ...”