“... Theseus was killed; so did the speed with which his death followed on the publication of his five war sonnets, his most famous and least typical poems, which had just been praised by the dean of St Paul’s for their ‘pure and elevated patriotism’. Churchill’s threnody to an already mythical soldier-poet appeared in the Times three days after his ...”

“... perestroika. Behind lay Poland in crazy convulsions of freedom and inflation, where a return first-class ticket to Vilnius with sleeper cost less than a double espresso in the Holiday Inn. There was a crowd round the iron stove at the end of the corridor. A dozen passengers pressed about the young uniformed conductress who normally gave out glasses of tea. But ...”

“... than Cole Porter and Ira Gershwin. This is a mistake, not only because there are so many post-war songwriters to choose from but because popular song is now the art-form through which most people confirm or recreate the experience of being in love. Love is nothing if not the common touch, and without Lennon-McCartney and the rest the Chatto Book of Love ...”

“... made the subject of a gripping analogy with the adoption of the Schlieffen Plan in the Great War. The current side, though, looks exceptionally flexible, not just by German but by any standards: they have, in Lothar Matthäus and Andreas Brehme, two world-class players who play their club football in Milan, where the ...”

“... equal merit. ‘I’m too respectable now’, he wrote in February 1889, ‘to mix among the lower-class natives as I used to do.’ By December 1897 there was no water in the spring which Hay had seen bubbling just over two years earlier. ‘Nothing has come to me,’ Kipling told Norton. ‘I am not bothering,’ he added. ‘Maybe South Africa will unlock ...”

“... was slow. The first major breakthrough was the introduction, by the Americans, during the War of Independence, of the Kentucky rifle: its bullet was wrapped in greased leather so that it would slip down the grooves of the barrel. By the 1830s, mass-produced revolvers, Colts for example, were widely available, but these were still muzzle-loaded and ...”

“... I was a gauche and provincial mathematics student of seventeen or so. Walking from one class to another, a fellow remarked: ‘You know what Wittgenstein wrote: “what solipsism means, is quite correct, only it cannot be said, but it shows itself.” ’ I recall this event from over thirty years ago with peculiar vividness. There are lots of ...”

“... a friend of Robert’s. The episode was glossed over in the name of Being, Nothingness and class struggle. Mascolo later brought out a lengthy essay on Communism in which he argued, ponderously, that an intellectual could not escape being a Communist, though at the same time it was impossible to be one. It was a heart-rending and sorry situation, as ...”

“... worked until he was burned for denouncing the rampant splendours of the 15th-century ruling class. My book records that Fra Angelico painted a splendid Last Judgment there, replete with swarthy devils and boiling cauldrons. In the cloisters the atmosphere is gentle, the sunny yellow ochre of walls, the terracotta of pantiles, the speckled breast of a ...”

“... architecture, mathematics, the seasons, fortune-telling and mining. After Zeus’ victory in the war against his father, Cronus, the newly enthroned god decides to annihilate the entire human race and create a new species in its stead. ‘No one did anything against this plan,’ Prometheus laments (in Ewans’s ...”

“... bad thing. Having invoked Hill’s Levellers and Muggletonians and Thompson’s incipient working class as persuasive analogues, Howe doesn’t go on to celebrate the Afrocentrists as offering a rich and challenging alternative to the all too obvious failings of the academic mainstream. Instead, he sees their efforts as culminating in the ethnic nationalism ...”

“... to remove him from the reactionaries in Berlin that Wilhelm was sent briefly to study at a middle-class Gymnasium in Kassel. There he established a warm friendship with a Jewish classmate, Siegfried Sommer (the great-grandfather of Ben Elton), and initially responded well to his new surroundings. Soon, however, Wilhelm found the tough academic regime ...”

“... and campaigners until it became – as it is today – practically uncontested by the political class. The widespread recognition that the English/ British ‘constitution’ is uniquely archaic and authoritarian, that this archaism derives from the incomplete English Revolution of the 17th century which merely transferred absolutism from Monarch to ...”

“... arguments against identifying, say, the novel Ulysses either with any one copy of it or with the class of all copies or even with Joyce’s manuscript. Literary and musical works of art are not physical objects, or even classes of such objects, but, on Wollheim’s thesis, are ‘types’. Each copy or each performance is a ‘token’ of the respective ...”

“... They are brought about, almost always, by the great all-rounders – cricketers who are top-class batsmen and bowlers at the same time, who refuse to say which role they prefer, and who can on any day be as good at one as at the other. Such players invariably upset specialists, commentators and authorities. The reason for this is that they ...”