“... Yesterday night at fifteen minutes after eight my little Waldo ended his life.’ He gave up ‘his little innocent breath like a bird’. It is easy to dismiss Emerson as a faded sage, whose vaporous hymns to nature or self-reliance seem less vital than the radical provocations of his friends Whitman and Thoreau ...”

“... scholar, best-known for an ambitious and highly controversial interpretation of the Age of Arthur. Londinium has been published posthumously, like Pirenne’s Mohammed and Charlemagne; unlike Pirenne’s work, it has been carefully revised and updated (by Sarah Macready). It is, remarkably, the first full-length historical treatment that Roman London ...”

“... Eliminate this privacy, and we are in the totalitarian world represented by Mao’s Little Red Book where ‘reading’ is on the agenda of the mass political rally. What happens between the Western reader and his book will always be intriguing. But short of some bibliometric equivalent to Masters and Johnson, it’s hard to see how the ...”

“... earth’s jealousy and defeat of her daughters where her sons are concerned – would give it a little wit. As things are, the repetition of ‘sons’ is tense against ‘my friend’, the moving simplicity of which stands in sharp contrast to the conceit of the first two lines. There are real tears in the verse, and they are not, in the words of Auden’s ...”

“... not a single example of Buñuel or Rossellini or of Cocteau or Fritz Lang or von Sternberg or Arthur Penn or Pasolini or Warhol or Woody Allen, nor a film directed or choreographed by Busby Berkeley, nor, amazingly, a film starring either Garbo or Fred Astaire, nor Shoah. Instead, it finds room for The Quiet Man and The Bridge on the River Kwai, three ...”

“... Yes, I know.Mr Birbeck: I’ve brought a photographer. I hope you don’t mind? We thought a little study of you in your own home would be novel and interesting.Leo: (bitterly) I’m sure it would.Birbeck proceeds to ask Leo, a playwright who has just had another successful West End first night, what his other plays are called, what sports he follows and ...”

“... cartoons, he published (or rather, mostly republished) work by John Steinbeck, Norman Mailer, Arthur Conan Doyle, Margaret Atwood, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, P.G. Wodehouse, Anne Sexton and John Updike. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 was first serialised in the magazine. ‘I only read it for the articles,’ joked subscribers, of which ...”

“... knew he had a squeaky voice, but several other on-field heroes – A.E. Stoddart, William Scotton, Arthur Shrewsbury – killed themselves after their careers ended, unable to cope with the loss of fame and/or money. Audiences demanded swagger in music too, forcing that poor ambitious provincial Edward Elgar to respond with ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. It was ...”

“... of other enlightened travellers, including William Marsden’s History of Sumatra (1783) and Arthur Young’s studies of French agriculture (1787-89), were intended as major contributions to knowledge. Marsden’s work was inspired by his regular attendance at the Royal Society’s ‘philosophical breakfasts’ in Soho Square.There were equally ...”

“... of description and stolen lines of song. In ‘When it’s time to go’, she quotes ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’: ‘O great classic cadences of English poetry/We blush to hear thee lie/Above thy deep and dreamless.’ (Here the word ‘lie’ is given its double entendre.) One poem is called ‘A Misremembered Lyric’. There’s also ...”

“... came out in the end, but does it always do so? No one knows to this day about the murder of the little princes in the tower, although Tudor propaganda inclines us now to think that it was Henry VII and not Richard III who did them in. Shakespeare’s efforts are just as counter-productive here as any claim by the ministry of lies. In that context one of the ...”

“... Ataturk’s Turkey and in some ways anticipated Suez, the leader of the Canadian Opposition, Arthur Meighen, had said that Canada’s attitude should be summed up in the words; ‘Ready, aye ready.’ Australia under Menzies did not fit entirely into that pattern. The book’s one weakness is that its author clearly did not have the chance to visit the ...”

“... seems to be in the same boat. So how much paranoia should we have? A modest answer would be: as little as we can manage, whatever amount allows us to make sense of the world – individual thresholds would of course be different, like thresholds of pain. Another answer would involve exploring paranoia itself as a symptom, which is what Don DeLillo does in ...”

“... and out of love’, which did not require physical requital in her case, she later insisted to Arthur Balfour that ‘I was no man’s mistress and never had a lover in my life.’ Margot and her beloved sister, Laura, conspired that they would both marry young, especially after a gypsy fortune-teller had proffered assurances that Margot was destined to be ...”

“... serviceable but perfunctory and poorly-written ‘quickie’ with no clear view of its subject and little understanding of the politics of the Labour Party. Robert Harris’s is longer, fuller and excellently researched: among the sources he has been able to see and uses very well are the GMC minutes of the Bedwellty Constituency Labour Party; he is thoroughly ...”