“... romantic loves of George Sand, Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult in the (relatively little-read) novel, Béatrix. It’s hard to know who could have done justice to the upper-class intellectual-bohemian melodrama played out in and around Coppet – perhaps Goethe’s troubling novel The Elective Affinities comes closest. Dennis Wood ends the chapter in ...”

“... background argument for the advocacy of collective security’. It could all too easily be read as a plea to avert the scourge of war, which threatened Western civilisation, through the creation of a viable international order, such as the League of Nations. Men like Murray, Woolf and Hammond were susceptible to the medium as well as the message: they ...”

“... from The Shepherd’s Calendar largely as they first appeared in Blackwood’s. In A Queer Book Peter Garside has chosen to use Hogg’s manuscripts as his copy-text, where these seem to offer something like a final version. On occasion, however, he produces composite texts put together from more than one manuscript, or from a manuscript combined with a ...”

“... But then Pauline is malicious; and her dialogue with her malicious self is there for us to read in her own words. Nanapush says of her: ‘The practice of deception with her was so constant that it became a kind of truth.’ Envious curiosity makes her potently knowledgeable: ‘She was the crow of the reservation, she lived off our scraps, and she ...”

“... by Stoic writers such as Seneca in particular. Seneca, who was, after all, a Spaniard, was much read in 17th-century Spain, especially in the court milieu. Olivares was represented as a second Seneca in a play by Quevedo, and the Count-Duke’s own library contained a number of works by the Neo-Stoic writer Justus Lipsius. It may not be altogether fanciful ...”

“... brutal the treatment of children. Edward Shorter’s The Making of the Modern Family (1975), now read in many European countries, defiantly announced that mothers have not always loved their offspring. Lawrence Stone, whose book Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (1977) prints some horrifying passages about maternal indifference and neglect. When ...”

“... Kregel on Harrod, by M.K. Anyadike-Danes on Robertson, and by Susan Howson on Hawtrey, will be read with profit by anyone interested in what precisely divided Keynes from those of his contemporaries with whom he shared so much. The Policy Consequences of John Maynard Keynes is also the outcome of a centenary conference held in 1983, and it reveals a wide ...”

“... Ben Nicholson, was published in 1937. Although they roped in a few contributors, such as Herbert Read, who were willing to give the Surrealists (for example) the time of day, only non-representational painting, abstract sculpture and asymmetrical and undecorated architecture are illustrated. The names on the cover show native troops stiffened by a strong ...”

“... and vigorous study, which carries the reader along despite its many technical details, can be read either as a celebration of trade unions or as a eulogy of the small businessman (on occasion businesswoman), for in this city there was no sharp division between the two. As the author plausibly suggests, the links between capital and labour, so much closer ...”

“... pacifists, anarchists, sexual revolutionaries, feminists, nudists and so on, many of whom also read and assimilated Nietzsche and Freud after their own cranky fashion. Let me give some more examples. Kafka was a vegetarian, went to a nudist colony for a cure, admired Dalcroze and made a pilgrimage to his dance centre at Hellerau, was deeply impressed by ...”

“... in the wilderness. Time alters the past. Gods, too, change ... The exclamatory staccato style is Peter Vansittart’s, and so are some of the words. Many sentences get no further than half a dozen words, some are mere singletons. The manner is intentional, but no more digestible for that. Its chief purpose would seem to be the conveyance of chunks of ...”

“... attribution – sulky, angry, bewildered etc – seems appropriate, since we need to read these faces that are being isolated for us, but it’s also excessive. They are just faces. The actors are not acting, but standing there, as Sergio Leone, a later graduate of the same school of cinema, once told Clint Eastwood to do. The next shot of the ...”

“... selling tickets for a benefit concert which starred the cast of Beyond the Fringe. At the gig, Peter Cook performed his Harold Macmillan routine, comparing the four-minute warning before a nuclear strike to Roger Bannister’s mile record (‘I’d like you to know that in this great country of ours a man can run a mile in four minutes’). In August I ...”

“... dissected by Ken Coates, and treated like a first-year undergraduate’s essay by Professor Peter Townsend. With his publishers bringing its publication forward to catch the crisis, the book might look like a hastily-written manifesto for the alliance of born-again social democrats and ancient political re-treads among whom he may be doomed to ...”

“... self-destructive, stripped of family, a figure who slides towards pathos and even absurdity (Peter Sellers as moustache-twitching Gallic ingénu). At the beginning of the trail, the central event has already happened; the detective, divested of any power to abort or determine, can only reconstruct, seeking an origin, an ‘answer’. The genre is ...”