“... In​ 1948, George Grosz sat for a portrait by Stanley Kubrick, then a young photographer for Look magazine. Grosz sits astride a backwards desk chair in the middle of light pedestrian traffic on Fifth Avenue. Neatly dressed in a suit and shiny black shoes, with a very slight smile, Grosz looks as though he’s conquering New York, as he did Berlin ...”

“... West in She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel. Best of all – albeit in a big failure – he met George Cukor and Katharine Hepburn on a film, Sylvia Scarlett, that was too daring for its time, in which he played Jimmy Monkley, a Cockney con artist, and felt able to be himself.He needed this, for his life was in crisis. In late 1933, at his father’s ...”

“... There’s not much doubt which is the winning side. Nowhere on either wall is space found for Walter Bagehot (1826-77). Yet G.M. Young, that hallowed chronicler of the Victorian age, came quite firmly to the conclusion that if you were looking for the Greatest Victorian, Bagehot was your man. There was no one else ‘whose influence, passing from one fit ...”

“... vision of upholstered modern life, as well as the tastes of its royal owners, Queen Mary and King George V. There was a working toilet made by John Bolding and Sons, and a gun room stocked with Purdey shotguns powerful enough to shoot flies. Artists created hundreds of paintings and books for its clubby, masculine library. Harold Nicolson gamely contributed a ...”

“... of Dr Wenceslaus Bottwink, a Central European Jew and expert on the high politics of the reign of George III. In the course of his researches on certain ‘confidential letters’ written by Lord Bute in the early 1760s, Bottwink also manages to solve a murder. However, far from being the novel’s hero, the Namier figure is, in accordance with the reputation ...”

“... vogues and the cant of critical fashions is what academic literary critics typically do, and George Steiner is no stranger to the game. He has never been seduced by changing fashion and, at its best, his writing is fluid and incisive. As a critic he has always thought of himself as fiercely independent, but the essays collected in No Passion Spent fit ...”

“... George Lucas is the most money-successful film-maker there has ever been. Of the eight films he has directed or produced (he eludes the conventional Hollywood division of labour), Star Wars and The empire strikes back have sold getting on for $900m worth of tickets. C-3PO and R2-D2 are as well known as Pope John Paul or Mickey Mouse ...”

“... R. George Thomas is a cautious man. His life of Edward Thomas (no relation) is ‘a portrait’ not ‘a biography’. Maybe this is just as well. The poet was a cautious man too. He was also a scrupulous one, and when we read in the first few pages that research for this book began ‘in the early 1960s’, we are encouraged to feel that author and subject are kindred spirits ...”

“... Realism in Our Time’, ‘Commitment’, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’ and several pieces on Walter Benjamin – already exist in English and have had a significant impact on the reception of Adorno’s ideas. But the collection as a whole provides the first substantial evidence for those unable to turn to the original German that Adorno was a powerful ...”

“... one – probably not even the author – knows in what relation they stand to a possible fact. If Walter de la Mare had known a disquieting and dominating old lady, and written about her, he would not also have been able to write the masterpiece of ‘Seaton’s Aunt’. The process works another way, too. In his splendid stories John Updike creates a far ...”

“... A few years ago the present director-general of NEDO, Mr Walter Eltis, told me that in due course Keynes would simply be a footnote in the history of economic theory. If so, it will be a stupendously long footnote, for additions to the already vast Keynesian literature mount by the day, not least from Mr Eltis himself ...”

“... of circulation in Middlemarch. Blood circulates, gossip circulates and money circulates, and George Eliot connects all these forms of circulation in the novel. As Beer says, not only are such words as ‘telling’, ‘retailing’ and ‘account’ common to both story-telling and banking, but credit too belongs to both concerns, while utterance has a ...”

“... paid to that, yet it still owed more to Hollywood than to any brand of Scottish realism outside of Walter Scott. When the home team finally arrived in the stadium – wearing a tartan that might have put Technicolor out of business before it started – the stadium was incandescent with belief and the children around me cried. The management of sentiment is a ...”

“... American policy. Thomas treads familiar and on the whole uncontroversial ground: the influence of George Kennan, the warnings of Winston Churchill, the first steps toward the formation of the containment policy. But here, as elsewhere, there is a one-sided, deterministic quality to the story he tells. Western policy-makers are curiously reactive figures in ...”

“... 1856, for example, described the inquest held at the Talbot Inn, Rugeley on the exhumed body of Walter Palmer five months after his murder by his brother William, the multiple poisoner. On the removal of the outer coffin a hole was bored in the leaden receptacle in which Walter Palmer’s body was confined, and instantly ...”