“... encouraging the precocious flight of her ‘eaglets’.Richard I succeeded his father but spent little time in England. Though he was praised for his courage on the Third Crusade (1189-92), he was captured on the way home by the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry VI, and held for a ransom of 150,000 marks – around $3 billion in today’s money, according to one ...”

“... there after demobilisation, in 1919, to resume his part in a quartet of friendship with Howells, Arthur Benjamin and Arthur Bliss. His siblings had also to contend with his burgeoning fame, which they did not understand: two published volumes of poetry (1917 and 1919); much performance and publication of music ...”

“... Tut’s tomb is opened, gets photographed by Man Ray, has sherry with Elizabeth Bowen, runs into Arthur Waley at Iseult Gonne’s, becomes Freud’s analysand in 1933, reads her poetry before the future Queen Elizabeth II during the Second World War. One wonders why there has been no biopic, or at least a mini-series. (Please, no one do this.)The fact ...”

“... In his​ History of Great Britain, published in 1653, Arthur Wilson wrote: ‘I see no reason why princes (towering in the height of their own power) should think themselves so far above ordinary mortals, that their actions are to be incomprehensible. This is but a weakness, contracted in the high place they look down from ...”

“... The Frenchman recalled a letter they’d composed after a consultation with the accountancy firm Arthur Andersen. ‘Could you tell Mr Arthur Andersen …’ it began. Andersen, the firm’s founder, had died in 1947. ‘They didn’t have a clue,’ the Frenchman said. They got a clue pretty quickly, however, and homed in ...”

“... an epigraph over his preface – the first words in the book, effectively – he quotes an oblique little exchange from Waiting for Godot: Estragon: All the dead voices. Vladimir: To be dead is not enough for them. I suppose this must be meant as a nod to Elisabeth Hauptmann, Margarete Steffin, Ruth Berlau, and the other oppressed and occluded members of ...”

“... The history of the United States since the close of World War Two has so far produced relatively little in the way of academic scholarship and even less in the way of serious scholarly argument. There are, however, two major issues that have produced both: the origins of the Cold War and the Eisenhower presidency – issues that have been the subject of extensive literature and extensive controversy and for which there are now not only well-established orthodox views but fully-developed revisionist stances as well ...”

“... had no need for violence. Here was a whole theory of beauty in a nutshell: but it is curious how little thought has been devoted to beauty since then, except as a rather anaemic branch of aesthetics. Unusual physical beauty, like unusual ugliness, is faintly scandalous: a product of chance rather than justice, it has typically been associated with ...”

“... it has most reason to fear that past. There are no doubt many cities in this condition – with a little insight and a dose of malice each of us could draw up impressive lists. But everyone’s list would surely include Vienna. All the same, it might be objected, Vienna can hardly be said to be discovering its past. Surely no city in Europe has put its ...”

“... serious Classical scholar has to read a great deal of German: but Housman seems to have read very little German literature for pleasure. One wonders if he ever tried Nietzsche, who might have interested him greatly. He had an affinity with Kipling. One of the most interesting things Mr Graves tells is that, in the text of ‘Heriot’s Ford’ in his copy of ...”

“... American liberals acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy? Why have they so little to say about Iraq, about Lebanon, or about reports of a planned attack on Iran? Why has the administration’s sustained attack on civil liberties and international law aroused so little opposition or anger from those ...”

“... of Burra-Burra Land, leering in every mirror and through every grille, were types drawn from Arthur Rackham, from Puck of Pook’s Hill, Photoplay and Comic Cuts, and dirty postcards. Even the fearsome Hispanic spooks were local villains, flashers at worst. And everywhere Burra went, with the possible exception of the North Pennines and extreme ...”

“... thou hast convinced me that no human being can ever be a poet.’ Somewhat chastened, perhaps a little huffy, Imlac acknowledges that ‘To be a poet,’ unlike being a critic of Minim’s stripe, ‘is indeed very difficult.’Johnson’s writing on such matters, while shot through with irony, often shades into allegory of a peculiar emotional intensity ...”

“... characteristic ‘Johnsonian common sense’ broke through. Reading the Memoir gives tantalisingly little enlightenment as to how such tortured works as Maud or In Memoriam came to be. But Hallam Tennyson is the source for almost all the illustrative anecdotes and biographical narrative which subsequent writers are obliged to use. There will always be, it ...”

“... one? Kipling offered his own explanation for his silence in Something of Myself: ‘Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established. Also, badly-treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear of it.’ Seymour-Smith finds ...”