“... of 72 who says he’s bored with taking snapshots in the studio (this morning Isaiah Berlin and Stephen Spender) and wants to photograph me outside. ‘Outside’ means that eventually I find myself perched up a tree in Hyde Park. Avedon’s assistants bustle round with lights, Avedon himself scarcely bothering to look through the lens, just enquiring from ...”

“... In 1948, Gear, then based in Paris, had exhibited with Réalités Nouvelles and, along with Stephen Gilbert, had also become one of only two British founding members of the CoBrA group, whose significance has been aptly characterised by Chris van der Heijden: ‘in the midst of the darkness of the Cold War the colours of CoBrA take on a special ...”

“... it is easy. We need two things from our banks. One of them is to keep lending money, especially to small businesses, which are essential as the engine of economic activity – the route out of the state we’re in. The government has poured unprecedented amounts of money into the economy in an attempt to get it moving. It’s done so through quantitative ...”

“... the dynamite bomb seemed tiny in proportion to its capacity to do harm; it could fit easily into a small bag or even a pocket. Using the pages of the Irish World, Ford and O’Donovan Rossa collected more than $20,000 within a year. Even those among the nationalist Irish-American groups who supported the idea of a bombing campaign in Britain viewed with ...”

“... boy who never finished the third grade, just below me; if I stretch out my left hand I can touch a small dark pleasant Italian, about five feet high; with my right hand I can touch somebody who came from I don’t know where, but he’s just been here two weeks while his wife had a baby boy. ‘In the evenings,’ Jarrell added, ‘I mostly write poetry or ...”

“... Ernest Goonetilleke, the first native governor-general, said. This was a point of pride. Don Stephen Senanayake, the country’s first prime minister, remarked: ‘There has been no rebellion in Ceylon, no non-cooperation movement and no fifth column. We were among the peoples who gave full collaboration while Britain was hard-pressed.’ After ...”

“... shirt, was alone at the bar. A couple of non-performative locals, supporting players, drank at a small table beside a wall of boxing memorabilia and photographs of scenes from the lost London. The subversive lock-in was migratory, coming down the Lea Valley and heading for the river. The key point of difference with the ethical profit-spreaders in Great ...”

“... total lack of formal education. So she started writing about the law instead, in pieces about the Stephen Ward and Lady Chatterley trials for Esquire, Jack Ruby for Life, the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial for the Saturday Evening Post. ‘The law, the workings of the law, the daily application of the law to people and situations, is an essential element in a ...”

“... was first published in the Morning Chronicle in March 1812, anonymously. The poem caused a small uproar at the time, but when he re-published it in February 1814 under his own name (among a group of short poems he printed with The Corsair) the effect was explosive. The ‘meaning’ of the poem had changed with the change of format and its attendant ...”

“... which Oxford-modern resolves by printing ‘busil’est’ – an emendation duly defended in Stephen Orgel’s excellent single-play Oxford version2 (‘my thoughts of Miranda are most active when I am busiest at my work’). The Oxford-original gives ‘busielest’ as what the compositor or possibly the scribe misread or wrongly divided in an attempt ...”

“... if given the chance. In a society apparently so alienated from its government, it seemed that a small well-placed shove from the outside might bring the whole regime tumbling down.There were a couple of flaws in this argument. The one Benjamin Tromly focuses on is the fact that the Russians eager to stay in the West were not democracy-lovers who had ...”

“... man. Most readers assume she was praising Johnson’s sober, rational side; Leslie Stephen, writing in 1878, went so far as to commend Tetty’s penetrative ‘good sense’ for discerning the same quality in Johnson, despite his ‘grotesque appearance’. But if we take Tetty’s ‘sensible’ to mean – as in this period it certainly could ...”

“... that would most help to make her legal case for separation’. Whatever she told her lawyer, Stephen Lushington, it had a galvanising effect. From that point, he recalled, ‘I considered a reconciliation impossible.’ Whether it was the incest, the sodomy, adultery, drugs or Byron’s episodes of apparent near psychosis, it shook Lushington to the ...”

“... John Huston to come out to Hollywood in the summer of 1950 to write about his adaptation of Stephen Crane’s novel The Red Badge of Courage. She just stuck with the project from beginning to end. If you know how to report in a certain way, by seeing people and circumstances as you might see them if you were writing a novel, then access becomes a daily ...”

“... the localised warming effect that any building has on the upper layers of the permafrost; only a small minority ascribe the problems to planetary climate shifts. Even the 2009 Greenpeace Russia report, from which I have taken my figures, strikes a cautious note, saying only that global climate change must ‘surely have played a role’. The hesitation ...”