“... in the political and cultural sphere ... forced by arrogant dictators, Frederick and Voltaire, he rose in rebellion and instituted a fierce campaign against reason’. Berlin himself is no enemy of reason, but he does feel an almost unbounded sympathy for those claiming to be victims of overweening pretension, even if that pretension is bred of rational ...”

“... the details, writes Wills. Lincoln, naming no units, no men, no landscape, no battle, no slavery, rose above the horrible particulars and ‘called up a new nation out of the blood and trauma’. ‘The act of bringing forth a new nation conceived in liberty is always an intellectual act for Lincoln,’ Wills writes – the italics ...”

“... are you looting for? asked the evening news.’ The protests that followed the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan by police are reduced to a set of sensational images: ‘a bus set on fire,/hooded boys with overgrown nails’; ‘a police helmet with a broken visor,/horses clumsy-trotting through piles of debris’.A correspondent in the riot zone asked anold man ...”

“... to death as the TLS has ever come, but it has continued to have its ups and downs. Circulation rose through the 1920s to 30,000, then dropped sharply, down to 23,000 by 1934, and Richmond despaired of arresting the decline: ‘Even among my own relations I know three households that have given it up.’ He did not believe, however, that ‘“new ...”

“... say you wrote a 400-page novel in order to let your mother know you were gay. This was L’Étoile rose, published in 1978, polemical, didactic and occasionally soupy. The narrator, David, welcomes the arrival of the word ‘gay’ in France from America, comparing it to the dove returning to Noah’s Ark with its message of hope, though he admits it hasn’t ...”

“... July 1976. Edgar L. Doctorow was born in New York City on 6 January 1931 to David R. and Rose Doctorow, whom he has described as ‘old-fashioned social democrats’. His grandparents on both sides were Jewish immigrants from Russia. Doctorow grew up on Eastburn Avenue, in the Bronx. His mother was a pianist and his father had a store in the old ...”

“... was good enough cloth for blankets, druggets and shirts. During the First World War, Mark Oldroyd’s Spinkwell Mills produced ten million square yards of cloth and employed 2000 people. Millions of soldiers wore Dewsbury-made shirts and spent frightened nights under Spinkwell Mills blankets. The Official Guide to Dewsbury 1957 (a librarian shows ...”

“... to a fame that seemed to increase year by year almost regardless of his written efforts. Ellison rose up the celebrity ladder, but had no more secure social basis than he had possessed in his years of poverty. He had nothing, really, that could make him comfortable with the superior things he could do and knew he could do, except to try to do them at a ...”

“... the art he deployed in at least twelve plays with such magnificent success. The arch-rationalist Mark Twain held Sir Walter Scott to blame for the disabling romanticism of the American South: Tennessee Williams, brought up on the Waverley novels, was a joyful victim of the disease. ‘I write out of love for the South … I think the war between romanticism ...”

“... my i’s to the left; if I am Hitler, I have very very tiny script and dot my i’s with a slash mark. And here is an interesting incidental fact about hands: when a person who has been paralysed from the neck down is given a tool that allows them to write with their mouth, they reproduce the same handwriting style as before paralysis. Your handwriting is ...”

“... some would say it has worsened – since the first democratic elections of 1994? In the words of Mark Solms, psychoanalyst, neuroscientist and owner of a farm in nearby Franschhoek, who also attended the conference, the question for the white beneficiaries of apartheid is ‘how we had sort of got away with it’ (not the outcome he personally had ...”

“... sifting of possibilities like that undertaken by her sandpiper combing the beach for rare quartz, rose and amethyst grains amid the millions that are black, white, tan and grey, can a poem be released into the dizzy freedom of the ‘rainbow-bird’ of one of her final poems, ‘Sonnet’, ‘flying wherever/it feels like, gay!’ ‘Writing poetry,’ she ...”

“... word on the subject, in the nature of things it could scarcely be the last. By contrast, Kenneth Rose’s superb biography will surely stand as the best and most interesting study of George V that we are ever likely to get. There is much greater understanding by the author of his subject, and the public and private lives are brought together with great skill ...”

“... substantial additions in steel, granite and mirror glass. The tallest office building in Europe rose at Canary Wharf, a huge new complex of offices at Broadgate. Everywhere, London prepared itself for a prosperity which never came. The results have left citizens bemused. We believe London belongs to us – you do not have to own the real estate to feel you ...”

“... by the diva Mara Zampieri, and staged, in keeping with Beardsley’s erotic drawings, by Jürgen Rose, it was a feast for eye and ear. And yet as I crossed the road to the Cafè Sacher afterwards I wondered how successful the performance had really been. Was it Barlog’s intention to provide Herod with a richly-textured personality and leave his daughter ...”