“... into the water, without waiting for bridging gear. And when the counterblows came – the SS King Tiger tanks bursting through the pine trees and over the Soviet trenches – these men died where they stood. This is the story of two great offensives and a finale. As the world still remembers, the Red Army halted at the Vistula in autumn 1944, in order to ...”

“... Maugham and Julian Symons, just as Dumas, and Boublil and Schönberg, have pounced on the story of Martin Guerre, and Verlaine, Georg Trakl and Peter Handke, not to mention a dozen playwrights and film-makers, have taken up the tale of Kaspar Hauser. These days the celebrity machine has taken over the translation business: Bottom’s dream is acted out on Big ...”

“... for thoughts, perhaps. ‘That’s lucky,’ Freud murmured when making an etching of Martin Gayford’s head. ‘A form has appeared which I am delineating. It is always there, but it doesn’t always show itself. It will help me very much.’ When the first proof was pulled many months later, Gayford was disheartened to see that the helpful form ...”

“... the Atlantic than any other organisation. It was an embarrassing but hardly revelatory find: the king was the company’s titular governor and historians have long known of his shareholding. But it vividly illustrates the fact that the elite had a stake in the seamiest forms of overseas expansion.Because companies landed in unmapped and poorly understood ...”

“... the ‘Imperator’ and ‘Sâr’ (a title he claimed was bestowed on his family by a Babylonian king) of a Rosicrucian order called the Rose + Croix esthétique, which Satie joined as its in-house composer. For the inauguration of the Salon de la Rose + Croix, the order’s cultural wing, Satie composed three ‘Sonneries’ for trumpets and harps. No ...”

“... outspoken partisans of social, political and economic equality. And during its early decades, when Martin Luther King, among others, travelled to India to seek inspiration for the civil rights movement, the country seemed a beacon to striving people of colour everywhere. Here was a non-communist nation-state of ...”

“... Johnson. ‘As the first African-American president, it might be appropriate to have a bust of Dr Martin Luther King in my office to remind me of all the hard work of a lot of people who would somehow allow me to have the privilege of holding this office.’ Afterwards, Rhodes goes out to dinner with Cameron’s team ‘to ...”

“... war broke out goes far beyond the events of a few days in early November 2020. Sarah Vaughan and Martin Plaut’s book represents the first serious attempt at an account of the conflict. They show that the war, which is mostly described in the later chapters written by Plaut, can’t be explained without an account of Ethiopia’s recent political ...”

“... for his deeply religious mother there was never any doubt: he was chosen, blessed, her own golden king. All through the pregnancy, Gladys Presley had attended her local Baptist church, the Tabernacle of the Assembly of God. This was a Pentecostal faith in which the happy ordeal of being born again was called the ‘burning love’; speaking in tongues was ...”

“... for Lesbian and Gay Studies at City University of New York, headed by the celebrated historian Martin Duberman, has become a bastion of this dynamic new movement, but Duke University is also celebrated for its department of queer studies, headed by the redoubtable Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Lesbian fiction has from the very beginning – except when it was ...”

“... among them Rowan Williams, Emma Thompson, Grayson Perry, Noam Chomsky, David Byrne, David King (the former chief scientific adviser to the government) and Thunberg.Less well known is their following among lawyers, farmers (including livestock farmers), medics (last year the Lancet called for doctors to take part in the protests) and even a handful of ...”

“... in North Sea grey, brooding like a Calvinist’s conscience over the city that started off as King George’s Gulag and still struggles to shake off the mighty influence of a minor archipelago on the other side of the world. A glance tells you more than you want to know about Our Bridge. It’s a solid job; it almost bankrupted its British ...”

“... on Eliot’s imagination, but has always claimed to like the sonnet ‘Idylls of the King’ which provoked all the London Review controversy, and he reprints it here. It is terrifying to imagine what he might say about a poem he really disliked: he has accused it of being rhythmically inert and simplistically nostalgic for a Christian past ...”

“... private correspondence with Queen Victoria alleged by Lord Esher in 1905 to have been destroyed by King Edward VII. Perhaps some of it was, but evidently much remains. I expressed the hope in the preface to my own book that one day ‘some wealthy foundation will finance a complete edition of the correspondence of the best letter-writer among all English ...”

“... to find a way to live. In the book, Kerouac had divided himself among several brothers named Martin. One (Pete) was fiercely determined to excel at football, a second (Joe) drove big trucks and longed to wander the West at terrifying speed on a motorcycle, and a third (Francis) was ‘a musing, discontented, lonely young reader of books … filled with a ...”