“... have done, a life undivided by such a cataract. In his introduction to A crowd is not company, Robert Kee voices some similar thoughts about the experience of war in youth. In fact, the subject of his book is not so much ‘death, fear, hunger’, as the effects of a unique kind of confinement on a young middle-class ...”

“... both Philby and Burgess, was recalled to Moscow and shot. During the three-year period covered by Robert Conquest in Inside Stalin’s Secret Police the NKVD leadership was twice liquidated. Nikolai Yezhov, who succeeded G.G. Yagoda as head of the NKVD in September 1936, purged most of Yagoda’s men in the spring of 1937 (though Yagoda himself was not shot ...”

“... body that begins in the late Sixties and has its issue in Unicorn (1971) – in which a naked young woman is harnessed in white strapping so as to support a long horn-like appendage on top of her head – this, and her use of facial masks and feathered armouring, recall Kahlo’s imagery. Even the somewhat androgynous ...”

“... Film Festival in 1962) and screenwriter: his credits include Downhill Racer (1969), starring Robert Redford as a champion skier. His novel about mountaineering, Solo Faces (1979), started life as a script for Redford. As well as subsidising some unprofitable novels, the movie business brought Salter into contact with a more hedonistic world: he spent ...”

“... recognisably connected with the minimalist and process music of Steve Reich, Terry Riley, La Monte Young and others. In Europe, on the other hand, he was famous almost exclusively for his operas: the most recent two had been commissioned in the Netherlands and Stuttgart, and all three had been premiered in Europe. His background was largely unknown.This was ...”

“... have aliens in and carry endorsements from China Miéville; others are alien-free and endorsed by Robert Macfarlane. He has fans who’ve read all the science fiction but not Climbers (1989), his semi-autobiographical masterpiece about rock climbing in the North of England, and fans who are effusive about Climbers but won’t go near the sci-fi. It’s not ...”

“... endorsement, 96-3. But between these smooth confirmations two brutal confirmation battles – for Robert Bork, rejected by the Senate in 1987, and for Clarence Thomas, narrowly confirmed in 1991 – presaged the hyper-polarisation of the present-day confirmation process.Bork and Thomas, like Scalia, espoused originalism, a reactionary trend in American ...”

“... thought much the same, it is, in fact, harder to think of an occasion when he was right. As Sir Robert Vansittart, the strongly anti-Nazi head of the Foreign Office in the 1930s put it, ‘Lothian was an incurably superficial Johnny-Know-All.’ In 1938, A.L. Rowse, who knew him at All Souls, went further, pillorying Lothian as ‘Britain’s public enemy ...”

“... like pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) and Kaposi’s sarcoma, rarely seen in otherwise healthy young people. A number of theories were proposed as to its origins, some unscientific (‘the wrath of God’), and others (homosexuality or Haitians) generally discredited once the human immunodeficiency virus had been isolated. The race to identify the ultimate ...”

“... reported that passing aircraft could interfere with radio reception. Less than a year later, Robert Watson-Watt demonstrated by a simple experiment in a field outside Daventry that aircraft could be detected by radio. Radar was born. Remarkably, it was only two years after this that Lindemann demonstrated to Churchill that tinfoil strips cut to a certain ...”

“... chancel. In the 15th century, the church was home to a choir, which meant herding together a dozen young boys and making them stand still for long periods of time; in the 1550s, the building came to be used as a grammar school, which meant gathering a larger number of boys and making them sit still for even longer periods of time. When archaeologists excavated ...”

“... Robert Wistrich’s book is about the Jews of Vienna in their golden age, Steven Beller’s about the city’s culture in its golden age. You could be forgiven for thinking that these amounted to the same thing. Not all Viennese Jews were cultural heroes, and not all Viennese cultural heroes were Jews. But the overlap is impressive and in need of explanation ...”

“... crisis in the late ninth and early tenth centuries, especially when the Carolingian heir was too young to lead an army, some of these magnates (Ralph of Burgundy, Hugh Capet’s great-uncle Odo and his grandfather Robert I) were elected king. When the direct line of Carolingians came to an end with the death of the ...”

“... was, after all, the time when the middle-aged men and women who colour British public opinion were young, hopeful and sexually active. Is it the decade that they now mourn and celebrate, or the charm of their lost young selves? Sara Maitland writes that this book began as a response to the mockery of her daughter’s ...”

“... he staged his paintings. ‘We were surprised to learn that his suicide was so ritualistic,’ Robert Motherwell said. For me, and I imagine for many others then as now, Rothko just was his paintings – paintings that seemed, when we stood before them spellbound, to be our shifting moods themselves. It is with some trepidation that one opens a new ...”