“... general during a lull that he had taught the crowd a lesson they would never forget. The general took no notice, and ordered fire to be resumed.’ At one point, the general turned to one of his officers and said: ‘Do you think they’ve had enough?’ He then answered himself: ‘No, we’ll give them four rounds more.’ By the end, the fifty Sikhs and ...”

“... they were from Roosevelt. Churchill thought Truman might be more malleable than FDR, while Stalin took a quick dislike to him after Truman – allegedly – dressed down Stalin’s foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, about the coalition government in Poland. ‘I have never been talked to like that in my life,’ Molotov told the new president, in ...”

“... outside, the world that forms the books.Writing about Christie in the LRB (20 December 2018), John Lanchester argued that part of the reason she’s still vastly more read than her contemporaries is that she was less invested in her subjects, and therefore less likely to break ‘the containment field of the detective genre’ by making ideological points ...”

“... conservatives.In the swing state of Pennsylvania (the fifth most populous in the country), John Fetterman, a left-leaning Democrat and a strong supporter of marijuana legalisation and criminal justice reform, defeated a Trump-backed candidate, Mehmet Oz, by 4.6 percentage points, outperforming Biden’s result in the state in 2020; the Democratic ...”

“... a sense of bitterness: the coup wasn’t the new beginning many had hoped for. When Zimbabweans took to the streets and, in ever larger numbers, to social media to express their frustration, she noticed that they often quoted from Animal Farm, which reminded her of the animal stories her grandmother had told her. Bulawayo’s non-fiction work became ...”

“... he negotiated a contract with Bernard Lintot (who was hoping to buy himself a poet who could rival John Dryden in merit and popularity) for a translation of Homer. This was probably the best deal ever struck by an English poet. The fee for the copyright combined with income from the sale of subscription copies of the Iliad made Pope around £5000. That was an ...”

“... Lagerlöf, the Swedish Walter Scott. The film’s success broadened Stiller’s ambitions, and he took Garbo with him to Berlin in search of more lucrative and prestigious contracts for them both. Meanwhile, Garbo’s performance in Gösta Berling caught the attention of G.W. Pabst, who cast her as a virtuous woman forced to the brink of prostitution by ...”

“... ethical code controls that voice? What does it echo, in the long history of warfare examined by John Keegan and Richard Holmes in their book-of-the-television-series, Soldiers? It looks to me as if fighting men have adhered to perhaps half a dozen different codes. There is the ‘rape and pillage’ style: a gang of men sets off to plunder a wealthy ...”

“... getting away from Cambridge on frequent trips to Europe. He worked for a time in the studio of John La Farge and might have become a talented painter; he went with Louis Agassiz on a scientific expedition to the Amazon; he received a degree in medicine from Harvard, where, despite his abhorrence of laboratory work and mostly to please his father, he ...”

“... of Wight, the town which Charlotte described, twenty years later, in ‘Ken’:   So when they took Ken to that place, I did not look   After he called, and turned on me   His eyes. These I shall see – Ken, however, is represented as an amiable idiot, whereas both Henry and Freda were victims of what was then called dementia praecox – that ...”

“... will crumble and where the new frontiers will coalesce. Medawar’s ‘genius’, his colleague John Maynard Smith told me, ‘was a bit unexpected. He had a genius for thinking of the right experiment which I enormously envy. I don’t have it myself: I never think of the right experiment. If I do an experiment at all, it’s usually the wrong one. Nor did ...”

“... and name-dropping. Not surprisingly, Lowell was not amused. The same disapproval fills his ‘John Wain’s Letters to Five More Artists’. The target is not just the peculiarly discursive poetry Wain invented in Wildtrack and its sequel, but the poet himself, who is presented as lacking proportion in marshalling great past artists to his ...”

“... According to John Constable, the trouble with self-taught painters was that they had such bad teachers. Creative writing workshops notwithstanding, every novelist is self-taught. An enduring reminder of this is Cervantes’s relationship with his equivocal double masterpiece Don Quixote, and the most persuasive analyst of both book and author remains E ...”

“... No one is conscious of all past moments in their history. The idea is weirdly reminiscent of John Locke. In itself, that is fitting, for it was he who put the word ‘consciousness’ into serious circulation, partly as an alternative to Descartes’s ‘thinking’ (of the cogito). Locke wanted a definition of personal identity, and he found it in ...”

“... are not new. The Peloponnesian War was triggered by one in the fifth century BCE; the Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453 after closing the Bosphorus. But targeted sanctions as a tool of peacetime foreign policy are a more recent innovation. In the aftermath of the First World War, liberal internationalists such as President Woodrow Wilson promoted them ...”