“... of the Night doesn’t seem to have been a pagan goddess. But the possibility was seized on by Charles Godfrey Leland, an American folklorist. His Aradia: The Gospel of the Witches, published in 1899, professes to be the gospel of a previously unknown witch-religion practised by a secret society in northern Italy; Leland claimed he had been given the text ...”

“... founded as a haven by and for outsiders. In 1917 the president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler, dismissed several professors for protesting against America’s entry into World War One. This precipitated the resignations of two leading historians, Charles Beard and James Robinson, both of whom had long ...”

“... P. Adams Sitney, who was about to go to Yale. ‘Sitney’s poetic passions that summer included Charles Olson, Ezra Pound, Virgil and Sextus Propertius.’ He also introduced his girlfriend to Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, Carolee Schneemann. ‘Her eyes opened wide.’In later years, Acker often said that she had studied linguistics under Roman Jakobson. This ...”

“... biggest birthday party. On or around 12 February 2009 alone – the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, ‘Darwin Day’ – there were more than 750 commemorative events in at least 45 countries, and, on or around 24 November, there was another spate of celebrations to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of ...”

“... This is but a weakness, contracted in the high place they look down from.’ The execution of Charles I in Whitehall in 1649 prompted (in England, at least) a slew of critical histories of his father, James VI and I, and his decadent court. Anthony Weldon, who is assumed to be the grumpy courtier author of The Court and Character of King James ...”

“... country’ as opposed to ‘The World’; ‘VC’, ‘Charlie’, or even, respectfully, ‘Sir Charles’, as stubbornly opposed to ‘friendlies’, subdivided into US, ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) and ‘Free World’ – South Koreans, Thais, Filipinos, Australians, New Zealanders and, keeping low profiles somewhere, 30 each from Chiang ...”

“... His more typical correspondents are his business agents in the Greek islands, his banker friend Charles Barry in Genoa, and the Greek Committee in London. The tone is, according to your taste, practical or already middle-aged. Perhaps, as Marchand suggests, the Greek leader Prince Mavrocordatos was flattering Byron and encouraging him to spend more of his ...”

“... faith, they despise family, they despise love’; and the Spectator associate editor Douglas Murray, who once called Islamophobia a ‘nonsense term’ because ‘a “phobia” is an “irrational fear”.’ One of Arc’s directors works for Legatum, a Dubai-based global investment firm ‘with an ambition to improve people’s lives by increasing ...”

“... Nor do the members of his own coterie fare much better. He is ‘wholly unsympathetic’ to Charles Williams’s mind, and although he has many warm and generous things to say about C.S. Lewis there comes a point at which he judges that ‘his ponderous silliness is becoming a fixed manner.’ Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer is a ‘distressing ...”

“... predictable. In the first paragraph of the General Introduction Deane compares this anthology with Charles Read’s Cabinet of Irish Literature (1879): it would be interesting to learn why Field Day rejected writers such as Monk, Ryves, Tighe, Leadbetter, Hall, Mulholland, and over a dozen other women who appear in Read. I particularly missed some of the ...”

“... the trip. Fuller’s ‘manifold nature’ (her phrase) was made up of many contradictions, as Charles Capper makes plain in this compendious and absorbing biography. She could be ‘sarcastic and reverent, serious and droll, self-regarding and self-sacrificing, alienated and engaged’. She had immense pride, and no pride at all.Fuller was first at many ...”

“... entrepreneurs were determined to get ahead of the game – was Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve, published in 1994, which made the case that differences in IQ between racial groups should be factored into policy-making. But Slobodian shows that this was just the tip of a Mont Pelerin-sized iceberg: you didn’t have to ...”

“... to make prudential changes in his manuscripts, and left the rest in the hands of the publisher Murray and his advisers: ‘Ask Mr Gifford and Mr Hobhouse, and, as they think, so let it be.’ To some extent this kind of interference, sanctioned as it was, justifies talk about replacing the author with Foucault’s ‘author-function’, a term designed to ...”

“... only those writers who rate more than two lines in Overy’s index – of the Eugenics Society’s Charles Blacker, of Vera Brittain, Cyril Burt, G.D.H Cole, Leonard Darwin, G. Lowes Dickinson, E.M. Forster, Edward Glover, J.A. Hobson, Aldous and Julian Huxley, Storm Jameson, Ernest Jones, Sir Arthur Keith, Maynard Keynes, Archbishop Cosmo Lang, Basil Liddell ...”

“... the heartland – from a terrifying anarchist. (I’m writing this in London, in the week the Jean Charles de Menezes inquiry opens; one should stop shaking one’s head at those heartland Americans round about now.) No one really knows why the real Lazarus Averbuch went to the home of Chief Shippy. The general consensus is that he wanted some kind of ...”