“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... widespread currency among the main theorists in the humanities. Although a number of his concepts may still be knocking around – for example, Grenzsituation (a boundary or limit situation) – they were too often expressed in a turgid idiom, sprinkled with cumbersome neologisms, that betrays a sensibility far removed from ours. Concepts such as ‘The ...”

“... the hard-drinking Danish Court in 1589-90, but his drinking was more commented on after 1603. This may reflect a cultural clash – Elizabeth I set an abstemious standard for her Court – but James may also have come to rely on drink more heavily in middle age. The almost insurmountable obstacle for anyone seeking to ...”

“... the Tower was in abeyance. After the Restoration Samuel Pepys often looked in. Any ferocities he may have witnessed would hardly have disturbed one who had turned out to see a live major-general hacked to pieces at Charing Cross. Baiting, Hahn says, went on ‘for some time’ before being criminalised. In fact it was still flourishing when Queen Victoria ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... gets the better of a male character (her fishing hook lodges itself in his earlobe). It has what may even turn out to be a happy ending.The overwhelming impression of Egerton’s stories, however, is that ‘there never was a marriage yet in which one was not a loser; and it is generally the more gifted half who has to pay the heavier toll.’ The women in ...”

“... to the back of the head. The same fate awaited Isaac Babel, who was taken from Peredelkino in May 1939. There were others, less well known, but equals in the manner of their death. ston05_3618 GalleryHow Pasternak survived the necropolitics of the Stalin era was a mystery. ‘It is surprising that I remained whole during the Purges,’ he wrote in ...”

“... of answered prayer. What a joy to hear from Mr Beggs of a £1,000 gift for the pulpit. Hallelujah! May that pulpit be the storm centre of the great hurricane of revival. Oh for a tempest of power, a veritable cyclone of blessing, Lord, let it come! Eight years later, the preacher rose up in that enormous pulpit and waved a copy of a historical study which had ...”

“... bestseller with staying power. ‘Curious to think that a slender little volume about lunacy may provide a meal ticket for my superannuated years,’ Styron muses in Selected Letters, edited by his widow with R. Blakeslee Gilpin. The irony of Styron’s career is that as a literary son of Faulkner, Wolfe and Hemingway, he expended massive energy and ...”

“... melt into a massive and expertly realised mise-en-scène. The French camouflage section at Amiens may have produced large-scale illusions, extending, as these volumes tell us, to the vast painting that was ‘raised suddenly on the crest of Messines in June 1917 to simulate an assault of 300 soldiers’, but Solomon now saw something bigger still. Peering at ...”

“... diver after all’s Done, still held fast in the weeds’ snare below ... My sudden struggle may have dragged down some White lily from the air – and now the fishes come. Meyers argues that the 20-year-old Frost chose the Dismal Swamp because other poets had written about it, and that Frost intended only to make a dramatic point to Elinor by ...”

“... terms of what was typical for its time. A handful of nit-picking philosophers and pukka historians may have frowned their disapproval, but why should anyone care as long as the trade in periods and period styles was booming? Critics, sociologists and cultural commentators had a vested interest in the idea of history as a single time-line divided into distinct ...”

“... In fact, neoliberalism lives on precisely because it continuously reinvents itself. The IRA may be a first in the US, but Europe puts more money into climate solutions and China’s subsidies for its microchips industry are four times those of the US. The facts were less important, however, than the claim of novelty. Bidenism wanted to respond to ...”