“... and a sadness, in the prospect of an ambition so large (‘for all mankind’) that it must always be frustrated, and comedy, too, in the rather easy and even proud way that this character accepts his frustration: is he not a little pleased with the ‘tiny black cloud’ that impedes his destiny? – at least it is the mark of something. So this character may ...”

“... Franklin ‘variety store’. The life-changing pair of panties appeared in a list of goods sold by a garment-industry middleman in New York. The pants were ‘two-barred, tricot satin panties with an elastic waist’ and their price, $2 a dozen, was 50 cents cheaper than that offered by Walton’s current supplier. This ...”

“... shot of the day out of reverence for life, why on earth had he let us come at all? I could not be expected then to understand that it was Sassoon’s besetting trait to repent of any gesture almost as soon as he had made it, to start wanting to extricate himself from any love affair or other allegiance the moment he had embarked on it. He lived in a haze ...”

“... Nothing Dr Bew writes is without interest.’ The wearily Olympian judgment was delivered by a distinctly peeved F.S.L. Lyons, doyen of historians of modern Ireland, when faced 27 years ago with a short life of Charles Stewart Parnell which took implicit but cheeky issue with his own magnum opus on the Chief. The young Bew – Belfast-born and a graduate of People’s Democracy marches as well as of the Cambridge history faculty – had already published a radical marxisant version of the 1879-82 Irish Land War, stressing the only partly suppressed war of interests between large and small tenants as much as the struggle against the landlord oppressor, and casting a cold eye on the cloak of unity that nationalist historiography tried to throw over the enterprise ...”

“... history was shaken in the 1970s and 1980s, and the epicentre was 19th-century art. Emboldened by the resurgent Marxism and feminism of the 1960s, engaged scholars including T.J. Clark, Thomas Crow, Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock asked difficult questions about class, audience, gender and sexuality, questions that were soon rumbling through other ...”

“... seashells, and having in childhood found the lurid polystyrene enclosures occupied every Advent by Father Christmases in the local department stores more sinister than alluring, I came only belatedly to an interest in grottoes. So too, it seems, did Shakespeare, who never used the word ‘grotto’, not even after the arrival of the French hydraulic ...”

“... different from, and even superior to, that of Europeans or white people. This view was mocked by some African artists, intellectuals and political rivals. ‘A tiger doesn’t proclaim his tigritude,’ Wole Soyinka said. ‘He pounces.’ But négritude was the animating spirit of Fesman, which was a huge success.Senghor took power in 1960 on Senegal’s ...”

“... claim a longer lifespan. The Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, signed into existence by 23 states in Rio in 1947, also predates Nato, though it isn’t celebrated in anything like the same way – perhaps because the US has a record of attacking the other signatories. The claim that Nato is unique among international alliances in duration and ...”

“... plays in which ‘everybody talks in similes’; and Westerns in which gold was ‘sure to be discovered at five minutes to eleven’.Topical themes promised ‘novelty’ but that dwindled in the inevitable ‘follow-ups’. Parker noted a bevy of plays dealing with Prohibition, the ‘Irish question’ (‘what a rough day it will ...”

“... in a ‘cold, damp three-star hotel’ in Liverpool, worried that if he went outside he’d be attacked. He had embarked on what he called ‘Operation Scouse-grovel’, after the magazine he edited, the Spectator, published an (unsigned) editorial describing Liverpudlians as having ‘a peculiar, and deeply unattractive, psyche’: ‘They see ...”

“... write this Life, and in fact the man himself noted before his death in 2016 that if there had to be a biography, Sisman would be the right person to do it. The result is an elaborately detailed and affectionate account that leaves a slight whiff of constraint. It’s as if Sisman had more to say about ‘Asa’, as a ...”

“... College. Here you could shop for Panton, Knoll or Eames chairs, World Expo posters or fabrics by Lucienne Day, and leaf through a range of zines, maps and books, while the building around you radiated optimism and repose. Among the books on sale were two about the architecture of postwar South-East London: Ana Francisco Sutherland’s Modern Buildings in ...”

“... newspaper in hand. He catches up with him at the physics department, where they’re joined by E.O. Lawrence, the director of Berkeley’s Radiation Laboratory. As a theoretical physicist, Oppenheimer doesn’t believe the story. ‘It’s not possible,’ he says: the massive uranium atom is too stable; splitting it into two other largish nuclei would ...”

“... terrible cost in lives and money. How bad was it? In a way it was worse than a defeat, because to be defeated, an army and its masters must understand the nature of the conflict they are fighting. Britain never did understand, and now we would rather not think about it. The troops are home from a campaign that lasted 13 years, including Iraq in the ...”

“... of Azra, south-east of Kabul. Early in 2011, going home on leave, he was called to account by local Taliban as a collaborator and told he would have to take part in a car-bomb attack on a nearby hospital if he wanted to redeem himself. He couldn’t return to his regiment without putting his family at risk and he couldn’t stay in Azra, so he left the ...”