“... now in breaking industry’s resistance to my policies. I shall win over the managers and the small businessmen, and I shall get the nationalised industries to welcome the planning agreements; I shall isolate the big Tory companies, then show how much money they have been getting from the Government, and if they don’t want it, they don’t have to have ...”

“... less than 1 per cent of Britain’s total population. And it has not only been comparatively small, it has also been relatively safe. Unlike Russia or France or Austria or Germany, there have been no pogroms, no show trials, no outbreaks of orchestrated anti-semitism, no final solutions. Ever since Anglo-Jewry’s return to Britain on the eve of the ...”

“... Sylvia disliked (‘I went into Valentine’s bedroom before she was up, and my eye fell on a small rosary by her bed, curled up and neat as a snake’) and she caused Warner, notionally quite permissive in such matters, much torment by a protracted and agonised affair with another woman. She was extravagantly loved and when the time came deeply ...”

“... house. The German states came out of it because of the strength of the court music at a host of small towns: that, and the Kantors at the free cities. The respectability and social worth of the composer-musician is shown in the dynasties – Mozart as well as Bach – which allowed the art to be passed on from one generation to the next. Purcell seems to be ...”

“... Mario Chigi – which was large enough to be a serious drain on the Papal revenues but too small to be taken seriously by the European powers. On the other hand, despite the losses incurred during the Reformation, the spiritual domains of the Popes remained vast. The Papacy was a power to be reckoned with, however difficult this power was (and is) to ...”

“... were on average 14 per cent heavier than women’s. Broca’s data were elegantly picked apart by Stephen Jay Gould in The Mismeasure of Man. Most of the difference is accounted for by differences in height and build between men and women, and once corrected for these, the gross difference evaporates. After Broca’s death – it turned out at his post-mortem ...”

“... in Paris with a CIA agent as its executive secretary and launched Encounter, initially edited by Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol. It attracted a host of leftish public intellectual luminaries as contributors, including Arthur Koestler, who in 1950 inaugurated the CCF at its opening congress in Berlin with a ‘Manifesto for Freedom’. Koestler, along ...”

“... on the undergraduate-and-general-reader market tapped with such undeserved commercial success by Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare.2 As such it undeniably knocks Greenblatt’s effort, not to mention Peter Ackroyd’s generalising and overlong Shakespeare: The Biography,3 into a cocked jester’s cap. The ploy of ...”

“... or at any rate ignorant – Australian young as exemplars of European experience and its burdens. Small groups of disciples clustered around them, absorbing political philosophy and an eye-witness view of the 20th-century history of Germany, Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union. Charismatic and demanding to the initiated, uncomfortable with outsiders and ...”

“... with spite. Few have followed Corbyn into his calamitous vehicle, Your Party, which endorsed a small number of mostly unsuccessful independent candidates. Among the most prominent were the Newham Independents, of somewhat questionable socialist credibility. The split left vote between the independent mayoral candidate, Mehmood Mirza – a local landlord in ...”

“... Prendergast, who in 1971 edited the Cambridge structuralist pamphlet ‘Signs of the Times’ with Stephen Heath and Colin MacCabe, might be said to have played a small part in the assault on mimesis. Now he has tentatively and scrupulously set out to rehabilitate it. Plato argued for excluding the poets because he ...”

“... and Bakalar’s evidence comes from impeccable professional sources. The Harvard biologist, Stephen Jay Gould, is a rare survivor from a generally lethal form of cancer. Chemotherapy induced in him ‘long periods of intense and uncontrollable nausea’ which only smoking joints alleviated. Gould notes that he had never personally approved of ...”

“... Such Were the Joys; Beaton by singing ‘If you were the only girl in the world’ in a voice ‘small but true’, and with what he also memorably described in A Georgian Boyhood as ‘an unsettling persuasiveness’. Connolly himself was less precocious, but did his best as the all-purpose old-fashioned aesthete. When he and Orwell went on to Eton the ...”

“... assertion that the Government was motivated by ‘racism and a certain amount of xenophobia’. As Stephen Braidwood has pointed out in Black Poor and White Philanthropists, it was a voluntary scheme. If London’s black poor were as canny and had community networks as well-established as Gerzina claims, why did they opt for the ‘deadly trap’ of Sierra ...”

“... struggle’, all ‘Eros and Thanatos’ and ‘solitary acts of personal liberation’. Teaching Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, he finds his students unwilling to recognise ‘the vitalism on which Red Badge turned, the priesthood of the life force, the riddle of blood and sacrifice’. So he obliquely prescribes William James’s essay ‘The ...”