“... anger. Similar feelings remain about Korea. Like Vietnam, it was a ‘limited war’ which fell short of stated goals. The preservation of South Korea was better than the total loss of Vietnam, but less than the ‘liberation’ of the whole Peninsula which American military forces aimed to achieve when they ventured north of the 38th Parallel. Moreover, we ...”

“... Olivier version, made, like the Branagh version, at a politically sensitive time, was distinctly short of eirenic themes. Not long ago we celebrated two centenaries – of the defeat of the Armada and of the Glorious Revolution. Both confirmed the popular image of the Continent as a source of danger, of monarchical absolutism, expansionist militarism and ...”

“... and whether there have been significant changes in recent years. The immediate questions here, in short, are not those of Marx about the putative overthrow of all élites but those of Pareto about the circulation of élites. At any rate, if this is an inquiry about whether the Establishment as we have known it has now capitulated to the impact of ...”

“... Changeling, that bone of contention between Oberon and Titania, here dubbed ‘the Golden Herm’, short for hermaphrodite verus, and afflicted with a terrible cold in the nose. All the fairies are sneezing and sniffing too, and there’s an incurably priapic Puck, making do – since he can’t have the Herm – with a mandrake root. These fairies are not ...”

“... put Mary McCarthy on the spot. Jarrell himself discounted this, claiming hardly to know her: but Philip Rahv at Partisan, who knew her much better, politely declined to print any of the novel, and Jarrell replied by sending him no further articles or poems. Gertrude is certainly his idea of the archetype of the American woman writer, and in this, as with ...”

“... leadership lasted little more than a decade (and that of his partner, Pelopidas, was also short-lived), but Cartledge’s treatment of the Epaminondas era is the richest chapter in this book, in part because the extant sources are far more extensive. Plutarch, a native of Chaeronea in Boeotia, took a strong interest in his region’s heroes, though he ...”

“... mind while the context in which it was written does not. Even the younger generation got in first: Philip Williams’s biography of Gaitskell (1979) and Michael Foot’s of Aneurin Bevan (1962-73) also long predate Clarke. Cripps’s biographer, as Clarke admits, faces the further problem that the Governments in which Cripps served – and his years as ...”

“... Huebsch, but the brightest example, the most sustained retraction of the claws, is reserved for Philip Garland, the brain-damaged son of his long-suffering cousin Peggy. At length and with great care he writes of animals, music and travel, gently encouraging the disturbed boy without condescension. ‘Now you will have to write back, as you promised,’ he ...”

“... the tobacco he had smoked as a Clyde-side apprentice before 1914 – and jammed it in his short Stonehaven pipe. He had hopes that my modelmaking might lead to naval architecture. Jane’s Fighting Ships and copies of the Motor Ship would come through the post. I had the interest, and all the shop-talk, but my maths was rotten. Just as well. A hundred ...”

“... he denounced Edward Jenner’s idea of vaccination as a mere ‘stunt’ which was ‘nothing short of attempted murder’ – he was prepared to believe, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say adopt, the ludicrous ideas of Dr Jaeger. To celebrate the death of his unloved father, who died neglected and poverty-stricken in Dublin in 1885, and to spend ...”

“... and animal life which is, for most readers, the main memory of the poem as a whole. Its four short books leave you with an impression of huge and uncontainable variety. Moving through ploughing in Book 1, trees and vines in Book 2, large animals in Book 3 and the tiny bees of Book 4, the poem packs in an unassimilable density of sensation and ...”

“... might very well be supplemented by a highly personalised nickname – Old Tom, Long Tom, Short Tom, or even, according to Rev. Alfred Easther, a 19th-century Yorkshire dialectologist, Wantem, Blackcop and Muddlinpin – it might better be described as an outbreak of name-consumerism, as parents increasingly invested their energies in baptismal ...”

“... Faulkner, Hart Crane, the Goncourts – Hardwick could turn her hand to almost anything. When Philip Rahv met her, he was struck by her gumption. He asked her what she thought of Diana Trilling: ‘Not much.’ ‘I weighed about ten pounds then,’ Hardwick recalled, ‘skinny, smoking, and he was quite surprised that I had read everything.’ William ...”

“... implacable and proud of it. When his son, Maurice, wondered why his own career had fallen so far short of his father’s, Macmillan said: ‘Because you weren’t ruthless enough.’ When Eden offered him the Exchequer, Macmillan did a Gordon Brown: insisting that ‘as chancellor, I must be undisputed head of the home front, under you’ and that there ...”

“... who sees an opportunity to reclaim her ex-lover John Pomfret when their children (her son Philip, his daughter Mary) fall in love. Realising that only one of the two possible Weatherby-Pomfret marriages can take place, with one killing off the other, she sets out to sabotage the young couple. Her devious manipulations are horribly plain to the reader ...”