“... common sense’ still alarms established authority – as witness recent experiences of Professors Edward Thompson and Michael Pentz with the BBC. At no point does Brecht suggest that ‘popular common sense’ is enough by itself. What he does try to show – repeatedly and variously in different plays – is that ordinary people are capable of learning the ...”

“... Master, whose name was F.H. Rawlins, (runner-up for the headmastership when Lyttelton’s Uncle Edward was appointed in 1905), rose at once from his stall. Above the echoing crepitations and showers of sparks exploding between the rows of boys, facing each other from their respectively decani and cantoris knifeboards, he pronounced anathema: ‘The boy who ...”

“... it, equip us to make a rational judgment. We may, for instance, conclude that the description of James Wait’s death in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ is verbally so close to the death scene of Forestier in Maupassant’s Bel Ami that the latter must have influenced the former; and if others agree, then something definite (and not uninteresting) has been ...”

“... are those who will never be able to bring themselves, even under the threat of Reagan, to want Edward Kennedy as President. Mosley did appreciate the existence, though not the nature, of the human craving to believe something. What he really offered to meet, though, was different: the human craving to believe in someone. (Not the satisfaction which looks ...”

“... in Britain.’ Nobody in government seems to have wondered how many people might use those rights. James Chuter Ede, the Labour home secretary, merely observed that ‘we recognise the right of the colonial peoples to be regarded as men and brothers of the people in this country.’How about ‘as women and sisters’? Until 1948 a British woman (not a ...”

“... Alfred Hitchcock) and those whose knowledge ‘changed everything’ (Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell). Everything-knowers are admired, though with qualifications: the ‘know-it-all’ is an intellectual bully or a bore, and one thing it’s useful to know is when not to tell everyone that you know everything. It’s no great surprise that ...”

“... The Inklings, though, was the best club, and superseded all others. It was founded in Oxford by Edward Lean, the younger brother of the film director David Lean, and was dedicated to the reading and discussion of creative work in progress. When Lean graduated, Lewis took it over. The group was for men only. (Dorothy L. Sayers, a keen Christian and an ...”

“... riverscape, townscape, and seascape. In Paterson, Williams included extracts from letters from Edward Dahlberg, Allen Ginsberg, and from a woman called Marcia Nardi, who had turned up in his surgery in Rutherford in the spring of 1942 with a sick son and a sheaf of poems. Williams liked these a great deal, and wrote to say so. He also tried to persuade his ...”

“... for details of the English dead at Agincourt. The herald hands over a paper, and the King reads: Edward, the Duke of York, the Earl of Suffolk, Sir Richard Ketly, Davy Gam, esquire; None else of name; and of all other men But five and twenty. The French have lost ten thousand, of whom all but sixteen hundred were persons of ‘blood and quality’. There is ...”

“... countries’ rulers. In his memoir, My Mission in Israel, 1948-51, America’s first Ambassador, James McDonald, quotes the rationale for US support of Israel that a ‘high Israeli official’ proposed to the Embassy in 1948: 1. The United States has a firm friend in the state of Israel, which is oriented toward the West politically and culturally and ...”

“... reader of novels. He disdained short fiction and didn’t read much non-fiction, unless it was Edward Gibbon or Darwin. I am nearly opposite in my tastes, but we did share our enthusiasms. Thom, for instance, thought Philip Roth was the cat’s miaow. I didn’t. ‘Try The Counterlife,’ Thom said. Which I did, and it dazzled me. Another time Thom said ...”

“... Parliament and involved riots and pamphlet wars; eventually, it led to such songs and poems as James Thomson’s ‘Rule, Britannia’ and Robert Burns’s ‘A Parcel of Rogues’. A digital search shows that the words ‘Scots’ and ‘Scotland’ occur nowhere in the London-published 1707 Affairs of State. This tells us something more important about ...”

“... about this undoubtedly American poet. He is the justified sinner whom we meet in the fiction of James Hogg. And he is the superman, the Stavrogin, whom we meet in the fiction of Dostoevsky: the antinomian hero bent both on power and mischief and on the blessedness of the meek, so that he’s Prince Myshkin too, and it’s hardly surprising that he should ...”

“... would spend weeks at a time cooped up in what one them described as ‘a floating steel box’. Edward Pullen, who served in the First World War aboard a destroyer in the North Sea, remembered: There was no life at all aboard a destroyer . . . you couldn’t stand up, you couldn’t sit down and you couldn’t walk about . . . And we always had a rope round ...”

“... the last to be born are, soberingly, Stephen Adrian Lawrence (1974-93, ‘murder victim’) and James Patrick Bulger (1990-93, ‘murder victim’). And so ends the 20th century. Turning from subjects to contributors, the roll-call is undeniably impressive; surely no other project could come near to matching the success of the ODNB in commanding the labour ...”