“... School of Economics was evacuated there and Cambridge genius found itself exchanging ideas with Harold Laski (Briggs’s favourite), R.H. Tawney, Denis Brogan, Eileen Power and her Cambridge husband, Michael Postan. Briggs began to read Marx and the new subject of sociology. He was drifting leftwards, remarking (after the Soviet Union had joined the ...”

“... be describing the work of Donald Davidson in philosophy of language, and of Nietzsche, Freud and Harold Bloom in moral psychology, as so many manifestations of a willingness to drop the idea of ‘intrinsic nature’, a willingness to face up to the contingency of the language we use. I shall try to show how a recognition of that contingency leads to a ...”

“... and so Bunny is born alongside Raffles, and with him that intense relationship ‘passing the love of women’, although modern readers have more often thought of Oscar and Bosie than David and Jonathan.And here the plot thickens, in Hornung’s life no less than in his fiction. He gets published in the magazines and plays cricket for the Allahakbarries ...”

“... can’t be standing there playing Russian roulette with it can you?’ Reading a letter: A. Love and Kierkegaard? B. (snatching it) Love and Kind Regards. My life does seem right staccato somehow. ‘Get the cattle prod and wake your father.’ My mother. When we say life we often mean risk. 12 ...”

“... Sedunary are on display at the city’s maritime museum. So is his watch, stopped at 1.50. We’d love to do more, a local official said. Belfast has done more. Stephanie Barczewski quotes an editorial from the Belfast Telegraph of July 1999: ‘In marketing parlance, the story of the liner is a unique selling point for Northern Ireland, and could open the ...”

“... Taussig and Marshall Sahlins), political science (Archie Singham) and African American studies (Harold Cruse). Robinson’s wife and intellectual partner, Elizabeth, began graduate studies in anthropology there, while Robinson joined the politics department, teaching on the new Black Studies programme, where the visiting speakers included Sylvia ...”

“... black writers probably want to talk about the same sorts of things as white writers – love, loss, desire, power, their relationships with their personal, social and political communities, with their environment, with other texts. Each writer, whether white or black, will draw on a varying experience of these things, ranging from the unique to the ...”

“... gibe of the time that Freud was the sort of mind-doctor who would prove that you had been in love with your rocking-horse. Perhaps Welles intended such a joke. I could believe almost anything rather than what Welles advised his biographer was the real joke. He told her something, when and in what terms her otherwise detailed notes of sources do not ...”

“... prime minister should get to know his secret service chiefs. Churchill and Margaret Thatcher did, Harold Wilson confessed he scarcely knew them by sight. Churchill was one of the rare politicians who understood the value of intelligence. He quoted intercepts to the Chiefs of Staff and got them in the end to organise the Joint Intelligence Committee on proper ...”

“... him hard to read. ‘You keep your cards close up against your belly,’ his interior secretary, Harold Ickes, complained. ‘You never put them on the table.’ Roosevelt played off one adviser against another as a matter of course. ‘Never let your left hand know what your right is doing,’ he told Henry Morgenthau, his treasury secretary and a close ...”

“... of her husband and ignoring his friend, are a source of scandal in the Party.’ Lee was in love with Wise but she didn’t want to marry him – even had it been possible – and didn’t even promise to be faithful to him. ‘So often when I want you most you are simply not to be found,’ she wrote to him. The difficulty with me is that men reach ...”

“... Tennessee Williams. ‘In Osborne’s values,’ Hare said in his memorial lecture, ‘you find a love of emotion, of high, true, uncensored feeling.’ For Hare, ‘resentment of Look Back in Anger, and recent attempts to rewrite its place in history, are, finally, resentment of vitality. One way or another, the bald can’t wait for Samson to get a ...”

“... Trail, but his favourite novel was the now mostly forgotten Lorna Doone, about a farm boy in love with a girl related to the man who murdered his father. Reading was half of Joe’s life. The other half was the natural world beyond his dooryard. Once his parents trusted him to keep shy of snakes and alligators, he was left free to poke about alone among ...”

“... to the age when prime ministers had the leisure to read poetry (Disraeli and Gladstone), write love letters (Asquith) or take morning drinks and afternoon naps (Churchill). I imagine there are lawyers, doctors, accountants, even writers, who feel the same sense of nostalgia for a rhythm of life that’s never coming back. Though he clearly regrets how ...”

“... three years before Jackson Pollock’s Mural and seven years before his drip paintings.In 1952, Harold Rosenberg, distinguishing the New York Abstract Expressionists from other abstract artists, wrote that ‘at a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act – rather than as a space in which ...”