“... organ, that his heavy middle-European accent seemed to issue, and hardly at all from the little mouth, perched below its overhang, that only appeared to serve as a hub, for a cartwheel of wrinkles.’ The librarian owner of this nose lives doubly in texts: among his shelves and, fleetingly, in Ernest Jones’s biography, where he appears as the ...”

“... have been one of the minor players in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time: perhaps a little like the fabled Truscott who is going to become a great poet, great actor, great statesman, great something or other. Needless to say, little more is heard of Truscott, but Mackenzie was one of those rare birds who not ...”

“... affairs. Strong on principle but again lacking an enforcement mechanism, the Pact had little practical effect. Some countries evaded it by avoiding formal declarations of war. In 1945, the UN Charter required all states to ‘refrain . . . from the threat or use of force’. It thus extended the prohibition on war to include undeclared ...”

“... One famous proclamation (reproduced in Lawson’s book) was issued in 1830 by Governor George Arthur in comic-strip form, and showed, in its last frame, an Englishman being hanged for shooting a native (though there’s no evidence that I’ve seen that this ever happened). The problem was that Britain didn’t have the means to enforce humanitarianism on ...”

“... in G Minor in 1876, was of ‘the genius of a master of whom we in this country know far too little’), it is a courageous change of mind. A controversial aspect of Shaw’s Music is the decision to reprint all the articles Shaw ghosted for Vandeleur Lee in the Hornet when he first came to London in 1876. At the end of his life Shaw wrote that ‘the ...”

“... affairs of state should be entrusted by the king ‘to persons whose intemperate passions were so little under the control of reason’. So it proved. Canning recovered from his wound but both men had to resign public office. No glamour or romance attached to the incident, which was regarded as scandalous. But it was more than scandalous; as Hunt argues, it ...”

“... classicism designed to negate the lachrymose effusions of the previous generation’s romanticism. Arthur Symons said of Gautier’s poems that they showed how ‘words could build as strongly as stones’, and wilfulness here carries the sense of chiselling designs out of uncut blocks, a description that captures something of Flaubert’s yelling out sounds ...”

“... is realism,’ a USIS official reported to Arnett. ‘Two days ago we staged a great attack on a little outpost. We had the men defending it like heroes and their women binding their wounds ... We don’t want to show the cruel things like bodies. We want to show how the Vietnamese fight the war as people.’ Peter Arnett won a Pulitzer Prize for ...”

“... right have, of course, long been out of fashion, although one of their greatest opponents, Sir Arthur Bryant, changed his 1931 view some twenty years later, saying of his earlier work: ‘if I were to rewrite it now … I might try to balance my understanding of the king and the men of the loyal party … with a greater understanding and sympathy for those ...”

“... were written between 1814 (Waverley) and 1819 (The Bride of Lammermoor). Meanwhile there seems little or nothing to do about the distressing nether parts, which are not so much bestial as apparently slightly silly: Gothic Abbotsford, the hard line on Peterloo and on riotous weavers, and at least twice as many more gimcrack, pasteboard novels and ...”

“... it comes upon me: pains in the back, hesitation on the feet. It is all sure to get worse. How well Arthur Koestler arranged things: just my age and then passed peacefully away. I too should like to indent for a death pill. If all other claims fail I could justify an issue of death pills as a precaution against nuclear warfare, which is rapidly approaching. I ...”

“... it looks more like life than death.’ Thus, some of the early poems have a tendency to do little more than dispense poetic justice. But as the selection progresses, the over-asserted paradoxes, the authorial pleas for perseverance, soften into gentler poetic phrasings; thoughts become more successfully embodied in images. In ‘Branch Line’, one of ...”

“... generations over the giveaway of lands they stood to govern after the Ottoman Empire crumbled. Arthur Balfour’s letter to Walter Rothschild affirming the British government’s support for ‘a national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine was a milestone in the history of Israel’s creation, even if the idea dismayed a number of prominent British ...”

“... isolates y and z by means of some rigorous and attentive sleuthing, and is then able, with a little lateral thinking, to deduce x: the identity of the murderer. Take, by way of concrete illustration, Michael Innes’s Death at the President’s Lodging (1936). The president in question is Dr Josiah Umpleby, head of St Anthony’s College, Oxbridge (not ...”

“... at the Hermannsburg Mission in 1929 as Indigenous ‘dreamings’, ‘Emu Hunt’ and ‘Four Little Girls Walking’; they are in fact traditional European cat’s cradle patterns the girls would have been taught by the German nuns who ran the mission. The Aboriginal flag, a horizontal black and red with a yellow disc, was first flown in 1971, and two or ...”