“... there was a sense of living in an open prison. In my case, this oppressive sense of unfreedom lay in the knowledge that it would be many long months before I would see my family again or take up my scholarship at Oxford. It was a miserable moment when I looked out of the window of the train carrying us to the troopship in Southampton, only to see the ...”

“... a kitchen porter masquerading as a dentist who lived off his partner’s earnings as a prostitute. Paul Buckwaldt adopted the alias ‘Sherlock Holmes’. And Karl Hentschel – ‘such a nuisance’ in Steinhauer’s view – repeatedly blackmailed the German Secret Service by threatening to reveal the identity of his own source to the British ...”

“... pursued ideas of material progress, or ‘improvement’. In The Invention of Improvement (2015), Paul Slack interestingly showed how a word that originally referred to profitable agrarian innovation took on a more general meaning as a progressive slogan for beneficial change of any kind. ‘Improvement’ was the application of reason and ingenuity to the ...”

“... of sharp flowers. Or had I a responsibility to/Speak to society: though how could it hear me? It lay in its hotels.The toad persists through a martial German phase, a Keatsian cemetery-haunting phase, a ‘song of my sociologised self’ (‘Long angry flounce, tuned to piping self-sorrow … Suddenly charmed by community’) until she abandons the ...”

“... as a way of replicating or ‘amplifying’ the chaos and violence all around.Isou’s genius lay not so much in what he did to language, however, as in his PR stunts. In 1946, he and his friend Gabriel Pomerand, a would-be actor and, by most accounts, a psychopath, sabotaged the opening night of a play by Tzara at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier. The ...”

“... in 1504, as it was disciplined and enriched by his autodidactic efforts on the epistles of St Paul, some of which lost endeavour may survive as a residue in the Annotationes. Throughout this time, while he was becoming familiar with the Greek text underlying the received Latin version, his aim was not to edit the Greek, but to revise the familiar ...”

“... the cast iron and other modern construction techniques that were transforming the landscape that lay beyond the Picturesque parks of the country houses. Britain’s internal stability had encouraged industrialisation – as well as the art market – and Schinkel was one of those who understood that this was where visitors might learn the most instructive ...”

“... hair short, Mark Gertler and C.W. Nevinson were in love with her, and the world outside the Slade lay open. Reading a good biography means thinking of unfulfilled conditionals. If chance or affection had given Carrington a push in another direction, she might have painted, cooked, travelled and made love in something like contentment. She was at the Slade ...”

“... in 1661, had done 18 years in prison himself and had ‘grounds for feeling vengeful’; that Paul Cobb, the seemingly feeble Clerk of the Peace who tried to let Bunyan off, went on to become mayor twenty years later when Charles II decided to get rid of his own obstinate ‘hardliners’; that over the years Bunyan’s congregation managed to carry out ...”

“... from the Ukraine could be as good a sailor as they.’ It was this kind of thorough expertise that lay behind the famous wish ‘to make you see’; and there is even more than that to Conrad’s compelling accuracy of thing and detail. It does the deep work for him, making supererogatory many of his more explicitly intellectual démarches. Or should one ...”

“... the psychoanalytic societies in Vienna and London. In an effort at reconciliation, Jones and Paul Federn arranged a series of exchange lectures in 1935-36, those from London being given by Jones on ‘Early Female Sexuality’ and Joan Riviere, and those from Vienna by Robert Waelder. In June 1938, the Nazi annexation of Austria forced Freud and his ...”

“... anomalous or unexpected effect, but any intelligent scientist does that. Rutherford’s strength lay in always being on the look-out for such effects and being extremely observant in spotting them. The most spectacular of those unexpected effects was obtained in 1909 by two of Rutherford’s collaborators, Geiger and Marsden, when they watched the scattering ...”

“... when it comes to appraising literature, at the expense of whatever ‘social entity’ can lay claim to it. The strong line taken by both Edna Longley and W.J. McCormack – who are sometimes in accord, but more often at loggerheads – testifies to the ebullience of Irish letters, in which things often get very heated indeed. Not invariably, it’s ...”

“... by Habermas, Charles Taylor and Walzer – ‘silly’. In his view, Foucault’s real difficulty lay in the fact that the ‘strategic’ analysis of power relations did not allow him to answer a different question: how can one resist force? If you are powerless, you are not capable of resisting: you can only endure. If, however, you are able to resist ...”

“... in the works he examined were often where he could hear it most plainly. The art of criticism lay in knowing what to listen out for, and having heard it, to identify and characterise it. ‘I suppose the thing about Hardy is,’ Bayley would typically begin, as though together we were to try and get to the bottom of a fascinating, but ...”