“... and is probably the greatest novelty. In some respects it is a very odd compilation. Back in 1960 John Russell Brown wrote an article, celebrated in the trade, in which he argued against the value of old-spelling Shakespeare, saying among other things that the amount of ‘silent alteration’ an editor would have to introduce would make such a text ...”

“... believe that the motive was sadism. Nor does he think, like Hitchcock’s first biographer, John Russell Taylor, that Hitchcock, far from enjoying the distress he was able to inflict on them, identified strongly with his victims. The women in the movies are, Wood proposes, ‘whatever we most fear to lose’. This ‘we’ may be just a bit too ...”

“... as anything else about him. (The idea was already becoming familiar in the performing world, where John Barrymore, notably, had played out the end of his career surrounded by idiot-boards as an openly bog-eyed parody of his younger self.) It was in the Fifties, then, that America’s taste-makers finally stopped resisting the attractions of dissolution and ...”

“... they ‘present an unpleasing exterior’. The ‘two Scottish doctors’, Alexander and Patrick Russell, explained in 1792 that it was particularly the height of the walls which made the streets appear so ‘gloomy’: ‘little better than alleys winding among the melancholy walls of nunneries’. The people of Aleppo, on the other hand, were consistently ...”

“... claim that was made was that with Freddie’s death popularised philosophy, too, was dead. After Russell, he was the last person who could, at any rate within the English-speaking world, make philosophy accessible to a general audience: from now onwards, it has condemned itself to be a hermetic subject. Today England seems to me so fundamentally ...”

“... to get married.’ It is The Awful Truth. Grant sits down at a table with Bellamy and Rosalind Russell in 1940 and says again: ‘So you two are going to get married.’ It is His Girl Friday. Asked what the Bellamy character in the film, the man who plans to marry his former wife, looks like, Grant replies: ‘Like that fellow in the movies. What’s his ...”

“... under Edward IV than it became again until late in Elizabeth’s reign, seems to fit Elizabeth Russell’s picture better than it fits Lawrence Stone’s. It was not until after 1600 that it became normal practice for Havering gentlemen to send their sons to university. One of her most striking findings is a clear negative correlation between Puritanism ...”

“... on this book for several years; the task of completing it from his notes was carried out by John McDowell. (The first two chapters and the introduction were rewritten by Evans himself in the last months of his life.) Evans’s death at such an early age is a tragedy. We can have no real idea what his mature years might have brought forth, and this book ...”

“... California instead of Southern California and calling the charismatic psychopath at their centre Russell instead of Charles. The cult’s celebrity patron is called Mitch instead of Dennis Wilson, and the group lives rent-free on a ranch where they help raise llamas instead of renting out horses, as the Manson family did at Spahn Ranch. Cline also removes ...”

“... another young man’s book, is its greatest precursor, and the theme was carried on by Mill and Russell. In Russell’s work it was associated with a theory of meaning, and Ayer’s contribution was to weave into this pattern the philosophy of language which the Vienna Circle had extracted from Wittgenstein’s ...”

“... worked themselves out higgledy-piggledy. His model for the process was Borodino, about which Russell Weigley also writes at some length in his highly scholarly and wonderfully absorbing study. (One would so much rather read about battles and games than fight or play in them.) Weigley’s main thesis is that military science, formerly relied on to win ...”

“... Foot loved Lord Beaverbrook ‘not merely as a friend but as a second father’, that Bertrand Russell ‘became one of the chief glories of our nation and people, and I defy anyone who loves the English language and the English heritage to think of him without a glow of patriotism ... ’ ‘What the hell has that got to do with it?’ howls Christopher ...”

“... and social reform. The New School for Social Research opened in 1919: Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey were on the staff; Harold Laski and Lewis Mumford were regular visitors. Located in Greenwich Village, the New School became a centre for music, dance and the visual arts, the place to teach or attend lectures. Much of the credit for putting it on the ...”

“... more recent Erics – Ambler, Sykes, Shipton, Heffer – oozed shame when signing their names. John Betjeman, in Summoned by Bells, agonises over Farrar’s ‘mawkish’ and ‘oh-so-melodious’ book through which runs a schoolboy sense of impending ‘Doom! Shivering Doom!’ The doom which Betjeman and his contemporaries at Marlborough dreaded was no ...”

“... society that George Tomlinson (a future Bishop of Gibraltar) and II of his friends at St John’s College, Cambridge founded in 1820 – occupies a distinctive niche in British social mythology. Or, rather, it occupies several niches, according to the taste of the mythologiser. In the eyes of many of its members, looking back in later years on the ...”