“... and told the story of the Jewish people from antiquity to the present. It was directed by Moss Hart, with a score by Kurt Weill, and had a choir of fifty rabbis, plus a cast of nearly five hundred, including the young Frank Sinatra. Huge audiences went to see it in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and the Hollywood Bowl. In Washington it was seen by ...”

“... generation proved no less avaricious. The eldest son, Henry, was drowned by his brothers, John and Peter, so they could get at his inheritance, but when they ‘sat upon the division of the landes’ they were confronted with ‘the sight of a bear’, which they take to be a ‘sprite’. (This reprises a scene featuring a bear in the popular comedy ...”

“... human evil. The unvarnished records of the Auschwitz trials have yielded a work of some stature in Peter Weiss’s The Investigation, and even the sub-genre of the memoirs of Hitler’s dog has achieved ironic elevation in Grass’s Hundejahre. Closer to home, Michael Hamburger has devoted himself to bringing German poetry before us and to maintaining its ...”

“... if technically difficult way to decorate a Gothic building, was obtained from the German painter Peter von Cornelius. Hugely popular exhibitions of potential schemes were held in Westminster Hall and much discussed, for the public expected a lot for their money. The scheme was supposed to encourage artists, educate visitors, stimulate the members of the ...”

“... the state of Anglo-Saxon studies’ that we are still reliant on century-old editions; cites Cyril Hart (a family doctor) as an example of what has been achieved by ‘those few able scholars who work outside the networks of patronage which have come to control the subject in England’; and deals with the Galbraith/Whitelock debate by declaring that ‘in ...”

“... in Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight in 1932. Ginger Rogers is rightly praised for Roxie Hart, Carole Lombard for Twentieth Century, Irene Dunne for The Awful Truth, Rosalind Russell for His Girl Friday. Apart from these recognised talents, which even a dullard can assess correctly just by agreeing with everybody else, there are unrecognised talents ...”

“... understanding combining – in so many words – ambitions of a Ranke, a Comte, a Proust and a Hart: to report accurately, to explain scientifically, to re-create imaginatively, and to judge impartially and benevolently. Perhaps the most striking feature of this programme was its association of two aims normally reckoned antithetical: an explanatory ...”

“... and not merely rights, in the tradition of American poetry from Emerson and Whitman to Hart Crane and Stevens is nowhere acknowledged: so Ginsberg’s relation to that tradition – Whitman apart – is trivial because unearned. ‘The self seeking the Key to life found at last in our self’ – Ginsberg’s hindsight on his Kaddish – is a ...”

“... of a coal merchant from Transylvania, Johan Petrus Hornung, who anglicised his name to John Peter. Willie was sent off to be thoroughly Englished at Uppingham School, then under the headship of the magnetic Edward Thring. Hornung loved everything about the school – the headmaster, the classics, the ethos of muscular Christianity and above all the ...”

“... Countdown Calendar (published in Tower Hamlets, printed in Hong Kong) with illustrations by Peter Kent. Kent has adopted all the standard tricks – colour enhancement, elimination of the funnel that carries away the exhaust fumes from the Blackwall Tunnel, weird perspectives promoting the status of the peninsula – but he can’t do much to put a ...”

“... overthrown. The CIA had no intricate strategy for the war it was unleashing in Afghanistan. Howard Hart, the agency’s representative in the Pakistani capital, told Coll that he understood his orders as: ‘You’re a young man; here’s your bag of money, go raise hell. Don’t fuck it up, just go out there and kill Soviets.’ These orders came from a most ...”

“... against Britain, and Irish independence.More recently, historians have offered other narratives. Peter Hart, for example, has called the Rebellion ‘a unique example of insurrectionary abstract art’:The surprise, the proclamation, the tricolour, the seized buildings and barricades were all there, but the targets seem almost purely symbolic or even ...”

“... it could have been a tram.9 March. I am reading Colm Tóibín’s New Ways to Kill Your Mother. Of Hart Crane’s suicide he writes: ‘He walked on deck … took off his coat, folded it neatly over the railing (not dropping it on deck) … then suddenly he vaulted over the railing and jumped into the sea.’ This was in 1932. At Calverley on the outskirts of ...”

“... have appealed much to Leavis either, but they do offer graphic additional proof in support of Peter Ackroyd’s assertion in his 1984 biography of Eliot that ‘when he allowed his sexuality free access, when he was not struggling with his own demons, it was of a heterosexual kind’: When my tall girl sits astraddle on my lap, She with nothing on and I ...”

“... stuff. Thatcher herself was clearly not averse to this sort of thing: her special adviser David Hart sent her a typically vainglorious note as the dispute was stumbling to its close, parts of which she underlined: ‘We are on the brink of a great victory. If we don’t throw it away at the last moment. Much greater than the Falklands because the enemy ...”