“... he admired totalitarianism. He was fascinated by its apparent efficiency and its sheer power. One may be forgiven for wondering why Picasso had not lent his support to Franco or to Hitler. Earlier in the book, in need of an international political backdrop, Huffington quotes Paul Johnson’s description (in his book Modern Times) of a party at the Kremlin ...”

“... followed by ‘The Unknown’, a Muse-poem: She is to be kissed Only perhaps by me; She may be seeking Me and no other: she May not exist. Thomas’s dialectic swings between flawed relationship with a fully existing woman, and the distracting ideal who ‘lures a poet’; between domestic compromise and the ...”

“... on 28 January and 8 February 1779 have always been connected with the joint portrait, but may well have concerned the poet’s courtship of Reynolds’s niece. In any case, Jackson was certain that Bampfylde’s rejection marked ‘the commencement of his madness’, adding that ‘on being refused admittance at Sir Joshua’s he broke the ...”

“... not lose sight of the universal nature of the problem.’ She concedes that such global sentiments may be of little practical use to a black youth in a dole queue, though perhaps more useful than a doctrine which ‘discourages Blacks and Browns from making essential adjustments [to British society] by laying all the blame for anybody’s lack of success on ...”

“... made about the Brontës’ works, was fraudulent; that Emily herself destroyed whatever it was she may have been working on during those mysterious two years – these possibilities Barker dismisses. She argues that Charlotte destroyed it, telling herself that the book’s publication would bring a renewal of the critical abuse that Wuthering Heights had ...”

“... to personal abuse than most men.’ Characteristically, she does not whinge about this; but it may help explain her own steely determination, and often her unrelenting hardness, as a defence mechanism. Moreover, as a woman she still felt a sense of alienation from this particularly male-dominated club. Again, rather than vainly seeking acceptance, she ...”

“... the career of H.G. Wells, who ‘remained essentially an Edwardian all his life’, with that of May Sinclair, whose concern with literary form and the representation of consciousness identifies her as a forerunner of Woolf and Richardson. Miller gives an illuminating account of Wells’s The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman (1914), which she quite rightly prefers ...”

“... for something in particular, and moreover to be disappointed at not finding it.Of course, you may object, this story is too elaborate. Too ‘conspiratorial’. If the rozzers want to do an old-fashioned fit-up, they can simply produce the letter from one of their own pockets, hand it to the suspect so as to get some fingerprints, and then ...”

“... unembarrassed commonsense – sometimes impressively spot-on, sometimes dumbly reductive. One may not want to give Shakespeare’s galleys to this man but at the same time it would be a pleasure to let him loose on X or Y.1. The sentence at a. differs in nature from sentence at b. In the a. sentence you are writing from the viewpoint of the Bloodgoods, in ...”

“... The Culture of Narcissism, and in 1979 delivered a speech on ‘the American malaise’ that may have been composed, and was certainly inspired, by Lasch, and whose chief effect was to deliver large numbers of voters to the upbeat Reagan. In the last fifteen years of his life, he seemed to take a curious pleasure in being out of the mainstream; it is ...”

“... two nations were fighting to decide to which of them ‘the empire of the seas shall belong’, may have overestimated the confidence of both sides, but the even-handedness of his judgment is more persuasive than the English posture of righteous defensiveness. Here as elsewhere Pincus’s decision to base so much of his account of Dutch politics on English ...”

“... Even more telling, he shows Henry to have been an efficient and discerning ruler. Odd as the claim may seem, although it would not have seemed at all strange to the King himself, Henry epitomised the ideal of the Renaissance prince, the focal point of a humanist enterprise aimed at educating the one person in the realm who had power over everything. When ...”

“... history of this interaction and examines its consequences. He makes the claim with his title (I May Be Some Time) and subtitle (‘Ice and the English Imagination’) that the mythic status of Captain Oates’s fruitless self-sacrifice is the direct result of the accretion of meaning around the idea of the snowy wastes. To the cultural historian, just to ...”

“... Arafat contented himself with nine separate security services; now he has 12, some say 14. They may make him feel safer, but they don’t have that effect on anyone else. Flying home I read Anthony Burgess’s verse novel Byrne, which, unlike Auden’s poems, mainly uses the Don Juan stanza. It contains some excellent Byronic lines, but after ten days in ...”

“... universals that influence art everywhere.’ And while he agrees that the concept of ‘art’ may be problematic, this is not so much because it marks off a domain of intensified aesthetic power and value, but because of the way in which the domain is defined. For the Western viewer, ‘Oceanic art’ is associated above all with objects in museums, and ...”