“... Books of Jacob. I don’t think it’s coincidental that The Empusium, with its echoes of Thomas Mann and The Magic Mountain, came out as The Magic Mountain hit its centenary, an anniversary marked everywhere with articles about ‘Mann’s many prophetic ironies’ and ‘nuanced discussions’ and so on. No mention at all of the ‘painful ...”

“... by training and profession, a philosopher by vocation, and an economist in his spare time, Frank Ramsey was blessed with an extraordinarily acute intelligence and an extremely likeable nature. Unfortunately for all those who knew him and for the intellectual history of the 20th century, he was also cursed with a chronic liver condition. He died in 1930 ...”

“... compiled. The Poetry Book Society Anthology includes several tantalising extracts – from Frank Ormsby’s ‘The Sports Section’, for instance, and Ken Smith’s cycle about life in Wormwood Scrubs, ‘House of Green Ginger’. As though to remind us that the Return of the Sonnet is a creative, as well as Lit Crit, phenomenon, Tony Harrison and ...”

“... But for Trilling the mix seems exactly right. The famed grace and wit come across, but so does a frank recognition of the defences and swerves forced on metropolitan intellectuals by events. Trilling’s story is told by other New Yorkers, including Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe and Norman Podhoretz, who between them seem to muster a greater range of ...”

“... to happen, we might as well enjoy them when they do. (Basically, it’s the argument advanced by Thomas DeQuincey in ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’.) Football used to take a similar approach. When Frank Rijkaard spat at Rudi Völler in 1990, we were showed the flying lump of gob in slow motion from ...”

“... as to those who tried a hopeless armed rising in 1848. Bew unearths a fascinating prophecy made by Thomas D’Arcy McGee (ex-revolutionary turned successful Irish emigrant) immediately afterwards: The people are not to blame that there has not been a revolution. Next time they must trust in local leaders like the Raparees and the Catalonian chiefs – fierce ...”

“... written to a correspondent who had theories of his own. ‘Dear Mr Riches,’ the letter says, Frank Greene, one of my nephews, was with us the other day and I told him of our discussion about ‘Will of the Mill’. He at once, without any hesitation, announced that he agreed with your reading of it. He was not content with announcing his own opinion, but ...”

“... where other postwar burnouts included the painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the writer Leonhard Frank and Bertha Pappenheim (the original Anna O). Warburg’s depressive moods and neurotic instability seemed to mirror the fracturing of bourgeois Europe. ‘He had the knack of experiencing the times in a direct and physical way,’ his younger brother Max ...”

“... Many Elizabethans would have agreed in regarding it as a non-question, partly because – as Keith Thomas has pointed out in an admirable lecture, ‘Age and Authority in Early Modern England’ (1976) – many didn’t themselves know how old they were. What they did know, or resentfully wished not to know, was their place – and youth had, or resentfully ...”

“... Making for the museum gate with long windy strides he lifted his eyes. Handsome building. Sir Thomas Deane designed. Not following me? Didn’t see me perhaps. Light in his eyes. The flutter of his breath came forth in short sighs. Quick. Statues: quiet there. Safe in a minute. No, didn’t see me. After two. Just at the gate. My heart! His eyes ...”

“... and races were staged with unprecedented intensity in such media ‘events’ as the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, and the David Duke campaign. Conspiracy theories detailed the infiltration of American higher education by ‘politically correct’ militants, and lamented the takeover of the art world by feminists, homosexuals and ethnic ...”

“... on British Sea Songs, including ‘The Sailor’s Hornpipe’; ‘Rule, Britannia!’ composed by Thomas Arne, with orchestration by Malcolm Sargent; and finally ‘Jerusalem’, set to music by Parry, and later reorchestrated by Elgar. All of these involve active participation by the audience which, as the second half advances, becomes ever more ...”

“... villainy. 16 March. To St Etheldreda’s, Ely Place for the funeral of Anna Haycraft (aka Alice Thomas Ellis) who died a week or so ago in Wales and whose body had therefore to be brought down for the funeral and then presumably taken back to Wales to be buried beside Colin, her late husband, at their Welsh farmhouse. This, I gather, is pretty remote and ...”

“... Royal Academy, only a few years after its founding in 1768; and it was there that he may have met Thomas Rowlandson, the other outstanding caricaturist of his generation.Alice Loxton spins her exuberant popular history around that friendship, and calls on their mutual friend Henry Angelo for testimony on Gillray’s early mastery: ‘The facility with which ...”

“... its incorporation of stray materials, the personal touch on the elbow that the American poet Frank Bidart, a close friend and associate of Lowell’s, ‘both amanuensis and sounding-board’ for the many books of sonnets, has brought to it. (A no doubt garbled account once reached me of Lowell flying Bidart across the Atlantic, so that he could fix ...”