“... League, with the title ‘How Not to Translate Marx’. The translator he had in mind was John Broadhouse, a pseudonym for the journalist Henry Mayers Hyndman, who was notorious both for his socialism and his pronounced antisemitism (he once said of Marx’s daughter Eleanor that she ‘inherited in her nose and mouth the Jewish type from Marx ...”

“... dated 8 October 1777, has been much anthologised. It is a personal letter that nevertheless ranges freely over the follies of the American War and dwells on the supine condition of the British people, seemingly blind to the faults of their political masters. ‘As to that popular humour which is the medium we float in … it is far worse than I have ever known ...”

“... but useful in providing provisional relief: some of these things are finely dealt with in John Wiltshire’s Samuel Johnson in the Medical World, recently reviewed in this paper. This is yet another way of being literal-minded, characteristically Johnsonian and quite remote from anything specifically ‘oriental’. Johnson’s Orient is, perhaps ...”

“... of God, as well as a history of our self-conceptions, of our utopias and terrors, and this is what John Casey provides. Casey is in many ways an ideal guide. He is bracingly conservative about the writing of cultural history, meaning that he likes texts, and chronology, and evidence. He has taught English at Cambridge for many years, and his book has about it ...”

“... hate it that the Arabs have a TV station that is free, where you can express yourself freely.’ After I met Azzam Tamimi, Louise Ellman, the Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside, made a speech in Parliament accusing him of anti-semitism, of links with Hamas and of being a supporter of terrorism in general. I got in touch with Tamimi to ask him what ...”

“... he be in a state of grace? Or had he eaten too much at dinner last night – had he tucked too freely into those plums, damsons, walnuts, cheese, to which he was so partial?’ Trevor-Roper’s charge against the Puritans is that of his hero Clarendon: the accusation of dishonesty and hypocrisy. First, there was the political dishonesty of the ‘great ...”

“... and security, that we can recognise how weird those years really were. The importance of John Lewis Gaddis’s book is that it is the first coherent and sustained attempt to write the Cold War’s history since it ended. That alone makes it hard to resist, but it is also wise and imaginative and written in a vigorous, simple English which is a ...”

“... Oxford meeting, she writes, ‘a fine House was whipped up to vote for the honour. The dons at St John’s were simply told “the women are up to something in Convocation; we have to go and vote them down.”’ Lipscomb reports that she got only three votes besides her own, but the position of righteous defiance suited her. At the end of the pamphlet, she ...”

“... home: Philby in Ambala, India, son of the eccentric explorer of Arabia (and Ford motor agent) St John Philby; Sorge in Baku, Russia to a German petroleum engineer and his Russian wife, the daughter of a prosperous capitalist from Kiev. Politically, Sorge’s lineage was even more exotic than Philby’s: while his father was a staunch subject of the ...”

“... libel damages at an acceptable level restarted the meter too high. A jury had given Elton John £350,000 damages against the Sunday Mirror for an untrue story which claimed he was chronically bulimic and was on a bizarre diet that involved chewing food and spitting it out. Of the damages, £75,000 was to compensate him for the harm to his ...”

“... seen Cabaret, listened to Kraftwerk, read Thames and Hudson paperbacks on the Bauhaus as well as John Willett and Ralph Mannheim’s punkish translations of Brecht, attended repertory screenings of Metropolis and M and put Louise Brooks posters on bedroom walls. Fassbinder’s real obsession was with the 1950s, and with West Germany’s US-bankrolled ...”

“... Beasts in interest. The volume has a valuable seventy-page introduction and some useful notes by John Haffenden, who arranges the material as far as possible in chronological order. The play or melodrama, Three Stories, was written when the poet was 20, and performed, with him in the cast, by the Cambridge ADC. Long supposed to have been lost as Empson ...”

“... country … The silence, I find, is a factor which has enabled the evil to spread.’ Likewise John Gordon, in the Sunday Express, who seized on John Gielgud’s arrest for importuning in 1953 as a chance to rip aside the ‘protective veil’ of delicacy around this ‘repulsive’ and ‘peculiarly ...”

“... school walls – trees whose branches climbed prolifically over roofs and partitions, and ranged freely everywhere like a band of irrepressible trespassers – sparrows had begun to chirp all at once, loudly, excitedly, and probably informatively. Now that the school was empty, it seemed that the life around it had begun to imitate the intent, sometimes ...”

“... Meet Me in St Louis, not because Vincente Minnelli stole the idea from Eliot but because both were freely borrowing from the same source. Given the absence of novelty in Pomo’s fondness for popular culture, the new insistence on what-we-have could only be taken as an affirmative gesture. An embrace of the high-tech lifestyle of the very rich was another of ...”