“... Man (1888) that the Nouvelle Athènes had been his substitute for Oxford and Cambridge, and he may have picked up his education in Parisian cafés and salons, ballrooms and bar-rooms, but there was an accompanying loss. He had an aversion to systematic education, claiming that scholarship left the essential mysteries of art untouched, but his refusal or ...”

“... for Jim always advanced me some money for rent or helped out financially in other ways.’ Keeler may or may not have been the most moral woman of the 1960s (my vote would go to Elizabeth Taylor for her belief in the sacred bond of marriages), but the looseness of her definitions is problematical for someone claiming to ...”

“... In a city as ‘large and populous’ as London, Bernard Mandeville observed, ‘where obscure Men may hourly meet with fifty Strangers to one Acquaintance’, people were encouraged to present themselves ‘not as what they are, but what they appear to be’. The city provided the opportunities to pass oneself off as what one was not. The consumer revolution ...”

“... break up and get back together, but there’s no real sense of what they see in each other (which may not be wholly unrealistic, but is dissatisfying in a novel). There’s not much sense of what the men see in each other, either, but that’s part of the point. They’re still friends now only because they have been for so long. Colin and Frankie, whose ...”

“... history. Fitzpatrick strives to avoid moralising and mawkishness in her writing, which may make for rigorous scholarship, but also may entail sacrifices. A case in point is her treatment of the practice of denunciation. Here she tests one of the key tenets of the ‘totalitarianist’ approach to Soviet ...”

“... that flower gardens engage his spare time thought.’ There are no blooms actually visible. In May 1915, the Illustrated London News published a full-page drawing entitled ‘Beauty and War’. A sign that reads ‘Regent Street’ has been nailed to a blackened tree, and in the foreground two soldiers tend a pair of perfectly rectangular beds of ...”

“... judge in his trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Richard May. He has also, through fierce determination and cross-examination, exposed the fact that the case against him is less solid than it appeared. Command responsibility – the ordering of a crime, or the failure to stop a crime that a commander knows or should ...”

“... the Whitney, with a note stating: ‘Since I took the trouble of having a photostat made of it, it may indicate that I am not so modest as I am said to be.’ Writing to Flexner himself, Hopper dismissed the interpretation and told the astonished critic that the painting depicted ‘a tuberculosis sanatorium’. The Hoppers had read The Magic Mountain with ...”

“... substantial parts of the ‘hermetic’ writings dated from the fourth century AD (although there may be strata of pharaonic material buried in them). The big problem for Crowley’s tetralogy is that over the twenty years of its making several of the books from which it is made have begun to look a touch barmy. Frances Yates thought that what we call the ...”

“... binding – but was paid off with £12,000 and died not long afterwards in Bengal. At first, Mary may have consented to her cloistering: she was pregnant by another man, and in order to secure the child’s legitimacy would have to pretend that it had been conceived later than it had been. The baby was hidden for three months, then presented at its baptism as ...”

“... splendour of the novelist’s archives must have been adequately consoling. In the end Stannard may have sacrificed little save the explicit imprimatur (which seems to have been withheld) and the result is a superbly detailed book, patient, affectionate, sometimes funny and, as the subject peremptorily required, very intelligent.The narrative of Spark’s ...”

“... is my chosen and particular task, and provided I can make the required effort the rewards may reach the unimaginable. It is as though there is an eye at the end of my pencil, which tries, independently of my personal general-purpose eye, to penetrate a kind of obscuring veil or thickness. To break down this thickness, this deadening opacity, to elicit ...”

“... and other fine thinges: as platters, dishes, glasses, cups, and such like thinges, wherewith you may furnish a table: and when you have done, you may eat them up.’ Trying to follow these recipes in 2016 isn’t easy, in part because of the delphic tone of many of the instructions (‘Take gum Dragant, as much as you ...”

“... other, on the face of it more surprising, non-religious sources of jihadi violence. The jihadists may have severely disrupted the international system of nation states, but they have had support in doing so from ‘enemy’ governments. The story of the United States and Saudi Arabia helping Osama bin Laden fight the Soviets in Afghanistan is now ...”

“... man’s life in the life of another.’ Stoker’s was, he went on, ‘the strongest love that man may feel for man’. One might assume from this that Stoker was a repressed homosexual. But what that actually means isn’t straightforward. In her essay in the Cambridge Companion, Heike Bauer writes that it was only in Stoker’s day that the boundaries of ...”