“... in its first form was typed in the summer of 1947 and completed by October. Between the middle of May 1948 and early November 1948 Orwell revised the work, and the final typescript was sent to Secker and Warburg on 4 December. The English edition was published on 8 June 1949, the American a few days later. Only pages 25-38 – Goldstein’s testament – of ...”

“... The plutocracy in a democratic state,’ wrote Mencken in a passage Robert Lenzner has chosen as epigraph for his book, ‘tends to take the place of the missing aristocracy ... It is, of course, something quite different. It lacks all the essential character of a true aristocracy: a clean tradition, culture, public spirit, honesty, courage ...”

“... my period, but despite some convincing quotation and an authenticating footnote, this work by ‘Robert of St Victor’ appears to be invented. (Readers of Wilson’s earlier novels will expect highly specialised pockets of expertise on church and university matters.) The treatise celebrates the anchoretic life: or the wisdom of virginity as the path to true ...”

“... stormy narcissism, and of Ransom’s detached courtliness, and to suspect that lovable Red Warren may not have been as cheerful as he seemed. The deft insiderism that marked some of Jarrell’s most memorable quips could easily be taken as an earnest of his genuine highmindedness – this mockery, the manner seemed to say, was literary not personal – and ...”

“... the South Pole. From 1913, when the news arrived of his death in the snow, until the late 1970s, Robert Falcon Scott’s reputation was frozen as the apotheosis of duty, Britishness and the selfless, good death. Then, just in time for the arrival of Margaret Thatcher’s brash, commercial vision of what ‘British’ was supposed to mean, Roland Huntford ...”

“... the naturalist away from home, Godwin asked Darwin’s wife for a letter of introduction to Robert Bage instead. To his surprise, Mary Darwin said she could not properly provide one since, though Bage was her husband’s ‘very particular friend’, she wasn’t sure she had ever set eyes on him. Undeterred, Godwin determined to introduce himself to ...”

“... There have been many short surveys, but no serious study of this important subject until Professor Robert Finlay’s new book. Political historians have preferred to study Florence, partly, perhaps, because the Florentines were always changing their constitution (Dante compared the city to an invalid in bed, always changing her position and always ...”

“... allowed to persist beyond a moment or two of genial acknowledgment. To fall in love with oneself may, as Oscar Wilde observed, be the beginning of a lifelong romance, but to fall in love with the lengthened shadow of one’s writerly possibilities as projected by the mellow light of kindly critical attention – that is the beginning of folly. The act of ...”

“... to see why the union should have seen fit to push the industry to the brink of collapse. It may be rational, even in a time of recession, to take on a plump multinational subsidiary like Ford’s, but it seems insane to grapple over the rusting hulk of some near-bankrupt nationalised industry. A rational explanation of union behaviour in these cases ...”

“... possibly all of them – will eventually develop Aids and die; in the meantime, of course, they may infect anyone they have sex with and any children they bear. Projections for the rest of the century show that a dozen years hence, in the year 2000, barring unprecedentedly rapid progress in the development of a vaccine, or an unpredictable change in the ...”

“... paint, was exactly what the makers of Abstract Expressionism in the Forties and Fifties pursued. Robert Motherwell was one of them, and his collected writings – a revealing gloss on artists of the School of New York and on modern painting in general – reflect one of history’s ironies. The Abstract Expressionists, who set out rebellious and ...”

“... by established names, among them Frank Conroy, Stuart Dybeck, Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Stone and Amy Tan. Those writers known partly for formal experimentation whose work Wolff did include (among them Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson and Mary Robison) did not, in the stories Wolff selected, engage with the question of how a story convinces us of ...”

“... the blinding flash of the first atomic explosion revealed their labours had not been in vain.J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist in charge of the Manhattan Project and hence ‘father of the atomic bomb’, was never openly remorseful. But he was nothing if not ambivalent, as Ray Monk makes clear in his superb biography. When the fireball burst Oppenheimer ...”

“... published a few years later, describes four voyages to the New World – the first of which may well have been invented – along with such further tokens of barbarism as Amerindians’ indulgence in sweat lodges and eating without tablecloths. More was reprising a genre in which tall tales were commonplace. Utopia, like Mundus Novus, describes American ...”

“... uses the phrase in a more nuanced way. His subtitle points to the fact that while Harold Godwinson may have been ‘the last English king’ (actually he was half-Danish), and possibly the ‘last of the Saxon kings’ (though that is just Bulwer-Lytton deflecting the shame of defeat away from England), unlike his predecessor, Edward the Confessor, he had no ...”