“... manifested during Monicagate. Hitchens ridicules the claim made by Toni Morrison and endorsed by Arthur Miller that because Clinton came from a broken home and had an alcoholic mother, he suffered from the same prejudices as those directed at blacks, and thus in some sense is ‘our first black President’. He knows that when Clinton, as Governor of ...”

“... Waves) and even Rudyard Kipling, as well as those of others mentioned by Luckhurst, such as Arthur Machen, Vernon Lee and Grant Allen. The concept of telepathy continually threatened to collapse distinctions between the literal and the figural, and the psychological and the metaphysical. As Luckhurst remarks, Henry James ‘always ensures the screw will ...”

“... arms and armour, he stood in the chilly drizzle over what was said to be the grave of King Arthur and chanted an extended, improvised rabbinical-druidic hymn. It evoked the strength and innocence of Blake’s Albion and ended on what seemed to me, at the time, a strange remark, perhaps a challenge hurled from king to king: ‘British poets are ...”

“... Henry Woodd Nevinson is one of my heroes, the sort of person I dream of being. The champion crusader of Edwardian journalism, he filed pro-Revolutionary articles from Russia in 1905, and pro-Nationalist pieces from India. He won an exhausting battle to expose forced labour on the cocoa plantations of Portuguese Angola. Celebrated as a war correspondent, he started off wanting to fight, and picked up his pen only when he couldn’t persuade his Radical friends to join him in setting up a legion of volunteers to help Greece in its war against Turkey ...”

“... early reviews must have made depressing reading for a beleaguered poet. Everybody remembers that Arthur Waugh likened the work of Eliot to the Spartan custom of exhibiting a drunken slave to show young men ‘the ignominious folly’ of debauchery. (Pound replied that he would like to make an anthology of the work of ...”

“... had been confiscated from Deutsche Bank. Another claimant to Mosul’s oil had to be placated. Sir Arthur Hirtzel, head of the political department at the India Office, wrote in February 1919, as the final touches were put to the postwar settlement, that ‘it should be borne in mind that the Standard Oil Company is very anxious to take over Iraq.’ The ...”

“... Or a caste. There’s the Vidal who appears in Two Sisters and the Vidal who appears as his young self in his Roosevelt novel, The Golden Age. There’s the ventriloquist Vidal, recognisable in some of his historical characters – Aaron Burr and the Emperor Julian – as well as in his satires. In Burr, Charles Schuyler, a character invented by Vidal ...”

“... Robert Baynes; the chief gunner, John Bulkeley; the carpenter, John Cummins; and three young midshipmen, John Byron, Alexander Campbell and Isaac Morris. They returned home in rival groups, by different routes, telling conflicting stories of exactly what had happened in the months following the shipwreck – accusing one another of mutiny, murder ...”

“... wig doing most of the work. I am supposed to be entertaining, or being entertained by, a group of young MPs, my only line being: ‘I will mention your name to the Italian Ambassador. I’m dining with him tomorrow night at Diana Cooper’s.’ Most of the time our table is ‘background action’ to a foreground scene of some talk at another table between ...”

“... yet still seemed nearer the mark.) There was no pleasing either side in that divided decade: Arthur Scargill was as hostile to the BBC as Thatcher, denouncing the TV news as ‘pure unadulterated bias’. And so it goes on, with complaints and threats stacking up like Brexit-blocked containers.At the outset, the BBC’s fragile autonomy owed as much to ...”

“... at least draws a line somewhere & says enough.’‘The deterioration of the intelligentsia,’ Arthur Koestler wrote, ‘is as much a symptom of disease as the corruption of the ruling class or the sleeping sickness of the proletariat. They are symptoms of the same fundamental process.’ One clear sign of intellectual infirmity is the desperation with ...”

“... new object, photographic, installation, trad fig. Since 1992 he’s been prominently showcasing young British artists, the objects of much attention and controversy lately. Surely some kind of indicative statement might have been expected. And this is what (ìn part) he said: ‘I’m not sure what today’s young artists ...”

“... with Simon Sechter, Vienna’s acknowledged specialist. He didn’t expect to die just yet.Few young composers can have had more formidable precursors, oppressively close in time and place. Vienna was the city of Mozart (who had died five years before Schubert was born), of Haydn (who overlapped him by twelve years) and of Beethoven, who, for almost the ...”

“... selling off much of it – houses, land, family heirlooms. There are death duties; he has five young daughters and a marriage that’s going to end soon. He needs cash.Howard is knowledgeable about art. He’s a serious connoisseur and collector, an expert on Wenceslaus Hollar, the prolific 17th-century Bohemian printmaker. Among his inheritance is the ...”

“... In a 1910 lecture on Swinburne, Housman recollected being told by Hardy that when he was a young man in London ‘there was a whole army of young men like himself, not mutually acquainted, who nevertheless, as they met in the streets, could recognise one another as spiritual brethren by a certain outward sign. This ...”