“... jokes about the boss telling his wife: ‘I’ve had a terrible time, dear, I had to spend the day working with the typewriter on my knees.’ I imagine some similar jest might be devised for the laptop computer, but I can’t be bothered. Roland Barthes anguished over the problem of the literary division of labour before word processors arrived and solved ...”

“... quality in Harrison’s rhetoric? Should we explain it in terms of the prevailing discourse of the day, which she was obliged to adopt in order to be heard at all, or should we agree with Tina Passman that ‘Jane Harrison wrote like a dyke and lived like a dyke’? Beard steps carefully around the issues of desire and passion; she prefers to address the ...”

“... had been a watershed for Barker, as he recalled: ‘my childhood came to an end on that day in nineteen hundred and heaven knows what when I spent my lunch money on a poem which seemed to me so great that for two or three days afterwards my own poems disappointed me.’ Eliot, for his part, seemed to respond readily to the strains of an antique ...”

“... Vail, seems to have been less well informed. ‘In Toledo,’ she tells us, ‘we spent the whole day searching for El Greco’s painting of that city, not knowing that it was in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.’ Alfred Barr, in the preface to her autobiography, claims that she had ‘loved and studied Italian Renaissance painting, particularly that of ...”

“... territorial waters. That was how the General Belgrano came to be destroyed later the same day despite the fact that London knew it had been heading toward home waters since dawn (11 hours earlier). The attack, which took 368 Argentine lives, proved to be the pivotal event of the war: until that time no Briton had been killed. Furthermore, efforts were ...”

“... resources with them. In American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (1993), Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton described five ‘distinct dimensions’ by which segregation might be measured: unevenness, which is the degree to which African Americans are over-represented in specific areas; exposure, the level of contact, or lack of ...”

“... temple at Ephesus.’ The brothel scenes were heavily pruned: this was a Pericles, in the words of Douglas Jerrold in Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, ‘disinfected of its impurities in a manner that would win the praise of the most fastidious member of the most moral Board of Health that ever held its sittings within the camphored precincts of Exeter ...”

“... market’ or ‘the nation’ can be unwieldy, and often carry scholars some distance from the day to day concerns of those who actually toil in the literary field. And ‘genre’ – a staple of literary analysis in other historical periods – presents a special problem for modernism, which so often took pride in ...”

“... After a bumpy start at Deerfield (‘I wish I was home,’ he wrote in his diary after his fourth day), he found his way to the school’s art studio and settled right in. The academic work initially overwhelmed him, and he detested the daily and compulsory sports practices. Rumours began circulating that he was homosexual and he was persecuted for it. The ...”

“... became a ‘celebrity’: a boutique director as fervently admired by Hollywood royalty – Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin – as he was in the European salons and cine-clubs. October (1928), which begins with the abdication of Nicolas II and concludes with the storming of the Winter Palace, followed; and then The General Line ...”

“... Cassatt (who she hoped would be her partner in a ‘chaste and intellectual marriage’). The next day, wearing a hired prince costume embroidered with pearls, and carrying roses and cornflowers, Barney called on de Pougy. (She usually rejected more mannish clothes – ‘why try to resemble our enemies’ – but they could be useful when trying to seduce ...”

“... awoken one morning etc, we might not have had The Corsair (which sold ten thousand copies on the day of publication), The Bride of Abydos, Lara, and the rest of the Eastern tales that followed. The lionisation, the affair with Lady Caroline Lamb that succeeded it, and the affair with his half-sister which succeeded that, the marriage, the separation, the ...”

“... herself was being worn down by the relentless pressure. So he got his way, with a little help from Douglas Hurd, and it is arguably the sole significant achievement of his political career up until the moment he became PM. It is also arguably the most significant factor in condemning this country to the most sustained and damaging recession since the ...”

“... of Bolivia, General Rene Barrientos, apparently first consulted with the American Ambassador Douglas Henderson, then ordered Che to be summarily shot. (Jean Cormier’s new biography follows the Cuban line that this was a decision made in Washington.) Che’s diary of the Bolivian campaign was subsequently extracted from his captors, and published in ...”

“... when the Presidents of Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia met in an emergency summit to discuss Sir Alec Douglas Home’s announcement in July 1970 that Britain would sell arms to South Africa. Mr Smith was invited to join the Presidents’ meeting and he brings out well the unbridgeable chasm of mistrust which opened between Britain and Obote and Nyerere. Unlike ...”