“... were paid per arrest – had been over-zealous, scooping up apprentices running errands for their masters, or children who were just playing in the street. But who will be placated with a rational explanation? There was a rumour, a whisper, of a deeper malaise in the state. Louis XV, people said, had become a leper. God was punishing him for his depravities ...”

“... they lived mostly in expatriate circles, but their friendships with other foreigners, including John McNair, the ILP representative in Barcelona, were rewarding. Lois was close to Eileen O’Shaughnessy (‘nice but very vaguish when she talks and is eternally smoking cigarettes’), who spent most of her time in the city while Orwell was at the front. In ...”

“... writer, and length of life, might be expected to provide some co-ordinates. Yet even among modern masters there is little consistency. James died in his early seventies, Musil in his early sixties: Leon Edel and Karl Corino awarded them each two thousand pages. Kafka, who barely reached the age of forty, yielded only five hundred fewer from Reiner ...”

“... were the foundation of the new medicine. As Marie François Xavier Bichat, one of its founding masters proclaimed, one can spend twenty years sitting at bedsides, but start cutting into bodies ‘and obscurity will soon disappear’. Rokitansky, in Vienna, is said to have done 60,000 autopsies during his career. (I had always heard 25,000 – Beethoven ...”

“... disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes’, to gloss the equally unShakespearian critic John Dennis in his brutal, difficult, intelligent and tragic old age; and trails a hash of Dylan Thomas’s resonant phrases (‘those short days when Time lets us play and be/golden in the mercy of his means’) across the end of the section dealing with ...”

“... building, a 16th-century revision of the 13th-century church founded by the Knights of St John. The Hole is a statement and it is properly capitalised. The labourers, a self-confessed art collective, work the Hole by hand, with pick and shovel, turn and turn about: four days to complete a grave shaft, without any of the tortured grinding and ...”

“... them of encouraging it. That year, under the leadership of the anti-Semitic former neo-Nazi John Tyndall, the Front launched a racist campaign aimed at schoolchildren called How to Spot a Red Teacher: ‘You can recognise them when they sneer at our White race and nation and everything that has made Britain great.’ In view of Ukip’s insistence that ...”

“... at distinguished universities slipped back down the social scale to being poorly paid writing masters at marginal colleges with minimal admission and retention standards.’ They felt ‘betrayed by the establishment that had recruited and trained them ... it looked not like a treason of the clerks so much as a trahison des maîtres’ (Kernan cultivates ...”

“... stemming perhaps from the great Durham lock-out of 1844, was the pithead confrontation of masters and men. The discovery of the coalfield ballads, a phenomenon of the Fifties, and the very basis of the Folk Club movement, powerfully renewed these memories, and cast them in epic form (Arthur Scargill’s first job, when he joined the Barnsley Young ...”

“... a part of political life – segmented, as sport always was, by the divisions of class and race. John Rickard’s survey of entertainment takes in dancing, music, magazines and newspapers; he also notes the formation of a Fellowship of Australian Writers, and its moves for grants and subsidies. He does not consider what the novelists, travel writers and ...”

“... have continued to be such gifted, if often recalcitrant, students, while appearing to the world as masters. Yet it would be a mistake to impose a dichotomy on Tagore’s work, between the modern, the political, the ‘critical’, on the one hand, and the romantic, the ahistorical, the organic, on the other, as two of the most intelligent critics of Bengali ...”

“... that he had already graduated from Princeton before America entered the First World War. His masters, as he himself acknowledged, were H.L. Mencken and George Bernard Shaw. Even the most ideologically liquored-up combatant in the culture wars of the last couple of decades might blanch at taking them as models. The sobering fact is that, by the time ...”

“... he puts in the second stitch, and my feet start to bang, I realise that he is the young sheikh in John Huston’s Beat the Devil. He, too, is ruthless and unsmiling, and finding Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre and Robert Morley cast up on his shores, plans to have them all shot. Bogart, however, discovers the sheikh’s soft spot, a secret passion for Rita ...”

“... bands in public performances at that time (the leading English amateur violinist and composer, John Marsh, complained in his journal that Haydn’s symphonies were also becoming too taxing for him). But for all their technical difficulty, Haydn and Mozart’s later symphonies were still written in the vernacular of the high Classical style – they were ...”

“... the methods of shipbuilding and navigation. The manufacturing middle classes displaced the guild masters thanks to trade with the colonies and the Chinese and East Indian markets. This is one reason Marx says that ‘the weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.’ For the modern means of ...”