“... the train was bound for somewhere on the Marne.    ‘It’s a grim grey region,’ my friend said. Yeats, I seem to recall, dreamed that G.B. Shaw was ‘a sewing-machine that clicked and smiled’. Greene sticks a kitchen knife into W.H. Auden and this makes no impression at all, so they settle down to chat. Auden says he holds a position on the ...”

“... that they should remember their birthdays. In Scott of the Antarctic Elspeth Huxley noted that Dr Edward Wilson’s 39th occurred during a side-trip to study the emperor penguins: ‘quite the funniest birthday I have ever spent’. In the novel, when Petty Officer ‘Taff’ Evans mentions his birthday in an attempt at emotional blackmail, Scott dismisses ...”

“... the Ashcan School of artists, who portrayed everyday working-class scenes (his students included Edward Hopper); the book opens with the statement that ‘art when really understood is the province of every human being.’ Haring had only just begun his course, but decided to drop out: ‘If I was going to be an artist, that’s what I was going to ...”

“... Edward I knew a thing or two about coal. He hated its stink, and in 1306 banned the burning of it in his kingdom, threatening offenders with ‘great fines and ransoms’. There are even records of coal-burners being hanged, tortured or decapitated (sources don’t agree on the punishment: it’s possible all three were applied ...”

“... of particular faiths, the country shook with indignation – not at what the prelate had actually said, but at the menacing story the broadcast and print media extracted from it. The Sun’s uniquely helpful contribution was a ‘Bash the Bishop’ campaign, corroborating Martin Amis’s suggestion in Yellow Dog about the way the red-tops view their ...”

“... to read Milan Kundera and Timothy Garton Ash, one would expect him to be referring them to Edward Luttwak’s Coup d’Etat: A Practical Handbook. If Trump is bent on dictatorship, doesn’t it make more sense, instead of suggesting Winston Churchill (whose bust is back in the Oval Office) as a model of resistance (‘Rather than concede in advance, he ...”

“... abruptly burst out laughing, suddenly take offence, spontaneously weep or are precipitately drunk. Edward Kuznetsov’s Russian Novel, providing as it does a sort of running commentary on Russian-ness, often throws light on that kind of puzzlement – which does not mean that it is a not a complicated and often perplexing book. At one level it is easy ...”

“... emphasis. The second half of the book gives critical readings of The Spanish Tragedy, Mucedorus, Edward II, Dr Faustus and Titus Andronicus, and it is, on the whole, less satisfactory. There’s a skimpiness and loss of subtlety suggesting haste and a looming word limit. But Hattaway is never less than stimulating. Indeed, the faults of his book are those of ...”

“... worked secretly for the CIA, while really being a double agent for the Vietcong; challenged, he said he never distorted his reports to Reuters because they were the only ones who paid him. On the broad question of whether any Reuters staff were or were not agents of the British intelligence services Professor Read, though he raises the point, is perhaps ...”

“... his own sort of creature: giant silken pussy-cat or, as he once described himself to Edward Carpenter, ‘an old hen ... with something in my nature furtive’. Gosse and Carpenter were of course all eager to know what was really going on. But Whitman was less furtive than serene: like any other big animal, he simply had his own complete ...”

“... in the use of condoms from 30 per cent to 70 per cent. Although only 2 per cent of British males said that they had had sex with a man in the past year, 40 per cent admitted to homosexual inclinations experienced exclusively before the age of 18. This suggests that bisexual play in adolescence is very common, but steady and exclusive homosexual practice in ...”

“... convenience. Its methodology is lies. An atmospheric scientist once told me that he had checked Edward Teller’s projections of the amount of fallout that would reach Americans during the years of above-ground nuclear testing in southern Nevada. The great genius had somehow left off some zeros, reducing the impact a hundred or a thousandfold, while other ...”

“... as ‘behaviourism’ was at the peak of its influence. Pioneered in the early 20th century by Edward Lee Thorndike, Clark Hull and J.B. Watson, behaviourism rejected explanations of action in terms of mysterious inner processes such as ‘thought’ and tried to explain behaviour purely in terms of the organism’s conditioning by experience. By the ...”

“... Bends, which I came across when I was researching an engraving after the Welsh artist and writer Edward Pugh, made some twenty-odd years before Telford began his work. According to Telford, the Irish politicians summoned to Westminster several times a year ‘dreaded’ the part of the journey that lay through North Wales. The stretch of the old road about ...”

“... epilepsy, hypnosis and other twilight states of consciousness in which the accused was said to be legally ‘absent’. Mad-Doctors in the Dock recapitulates elements of both, and of the work that undergirds the whole project, Nigel Walker’s Crime and Insanity in England, Vol. I (1968). Although it breaks less fresh ground than its ...”