“... books under review belong to very different genres, both of which are relevant to this task – John Willett’s a critical and historical study based on many years as reviewer, English editor and translator of Brecht, Ronald Hayman’s a lively, detailed biography – though the first turns out to be far the more expert, original and ...”

“... of the attentiveness called for, and it ended in tears. Remembering this debacle, he later took a strong line about feminine demands on him, somewhat in the manner of Dick in The Devil’s Disciple. Among those he tormented were Edith Bland, whose husband Hubert was unfaithful. Failing to get Shaw into bed, she made her famous complaint: ‘You had no ...”

“... you prefer the Brady Bunch to the Partridge family, for instance, as Uma Thurman wants to know of John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, is simultaneously a test, a cultural allusion and a send-up of the whole idea of culture. The funniest moment in Pulp Fiction concerns Harvey Keitel, come to clean up after John Travolta and ...”

“... chose either to emphasise or obfuscate that fact. (One masterpiece of dishonest revisionism, John Hall’s translation of 1652, begins He that sits next to thee now and hears Thy charming voyce, to me appears Beauteous as any Deity That rules the skie. How did his pleasing glances dart Sweet languors to my ravish’d heart At the first sight though ...”

“... weapons represents a sufficient challenge to a nation’s security to constitute maximum peril,’ John F. Kennedy told the nation during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. ‘Nuclear weapons are so destructive and ballistic missiles are so swift that any substantially increased possibility of their use or any sudden change in their deployment may well be ...”

“... to David O’Leary, executive director of the Home Builders Federation, a few months after Starmer took office, he was enthusiastic about Labour’s efforts. ‘What the government has done so far is more than we could have expected them to have done. They’ve rewritten the planning system in a hundred days … they’ve gone as far as talking about ...”

“... the networks were taken over, completed and run by national or local government. The United States took a different route. America let private companies carry on providing vital services like electricity; it also let them have local monopolies. But in exchange for being protected from competition, the companies accepted limits on their profits. The limit was ...”

“... have cruised down the Lea Valley from Lippitt’s Hill Camp at High Beach, a base right beside John Clare’s Epping Forest asylum, and they’ll be back again tomorrow. Sukhdev Sandhu, who flew with the sky cops for his book Night Haunts, called the experience ‘the panoptic sublime’. The machines cost half a million pounds each, a sum that pays for a ...”

“... knowing that Mary was eventually bent to God’s plan. And, perhaps for the first time, Minnie took pity on her child self. In fragmented entries she recalled ‘Ed. coming. Fear of him. Love? Always a strain.’ It was ‘a terrible time. Dreary, helpless. From the first the most fatal thing was the strain on my conscience of the position toward Edward ...”

“... day: one of those erotic days that [Alphonse] Daudet likes to describe. It began to drizzle. She took – mind you, I was her master and she was my slave – she took hold of me by the hair at the back of my head and said to me ‘Come.’ What followed was the sensations we have all experienced. But the sweet clasp of my ...”

“... of his uncle being a farm-labourer, or the blighted life of the intelligent, radical cobbler John Antell who married into the family. Instead, Hardy exaggerates the scale of the Rockhampton cottage where he was born, his father’s status in the social scale (he attributes his comparative lack of success in the building business to his being by nature ...”

“... new poem, and gave the poet a genial thumbs-up. Some years later Hughes told another variation to John Carey, to which he added some Jungian grace notes, and the probably too uncanny touch that the visitor was Hughes himself with a vulpine head. In Poet and Critic, an interesting edition of Hughes’s correspondence with Keith Sagar, we have yet another ...”

“... was taken to Berlin, where it belonged to the cellist and teacher Hugo Becker, with whom Hermann took lessons. It was transported to London and finally to the Museo del Violino in Cremona, where it had been made three centuries earlier.The protagonists of the final – comic – story are the ‘world’s most famous shipwrecked cello’, the ...”

“... fixer in the union and on the council rather than a campaigner (no one can remember any causes he took up); a man who was frightened of talking politics at home, because his first wife Jenny objected to them. Percy, we learn, was ‘very narrow-minded’. He had kept his son and daughter at grammar school, thus enabling Mark Hudson’s father to make his ...”

“... country. One daughter is an architect; the other daughter and the son are, like him, lawyers. ‘I took my son to make his first appearance in the Supreme Court,’ he said. ‘He looked at the portraits of the old judges and there he saw his grandfather.’ Youssef Hakim, Jacques’s father, had been an Ottoman-trained jurist who served on the Court during ...”