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“... became Communists as impressionable students, both at times when Communism was high fashion among young intellectuals. The decisive influence in each case was war. Not, however, the same war. Born in 1895, and Philby’s senior by 16 years, Sorge belonged to the generation that would shortly be plunged into the Kaiser’s great miscalculation. Three days ...”

“... suffer the loss they were afraid of, yes,Holders of one position, wrong for years.This has the young Auden’s typical combination of doomwatch and kicking energy. The voice of the inevitable is speaking, the voice of evolutionary force, the voice of what he would eventually and notoriously, in the last stanza of ‘Spain’, call History. So it is proper ...”

“... for writers such as Abel Boyer, George Ridpath and Thomas Burnet; even such a nameless name as Stephen Whatley, too obscure even to make it to the Dunciad, can be plausibly associated with several pamphlets, whilst Arthur Maynwaring is emerging from the shadows as a regular antagonist with the major authors of his day. Even where no such individual can be ...”

“... as he found exemplified by the poet David Jones when visiting him in a Harrow lodging-house with Stephen Spender, and the ‘many lives of pastiche’. But he is aware of the origin of his woes. From 4 October 1953: ‘My deepest problem. I have changed families and at a terrible cost substituted my ideal for my real one’ – an admission of 1994 which ...”

“... can and should be posed in the realm of grammar.’ Jakobson wrote that, not as an insolent young Formalist in 1921, but as a Harvard dignitary, in 1961. The poems he had in view at that moment were two lyrics by Pushkin. Jakobson’s exhaustive parsings of individual poems are virtuoso efforts at grammatical and syntactical description – to his ...”

“... However, in a book rendered appallingly poignant by her premature death this year, the brilliant young French medical historian Roselyne Rey observes that pain always was and still remains a poor relation in the medical mansion. Suffering, the Church had ruled, was the lot of sinners; so like the poor, pain would always be with us – which made it easy for ...”

“... two faces, and don’t necessarily know which is the true one. Peter was then a tall, rosy-cheeked young man with blond hair flopping over his forehead, like an overgrown schoolboy, and I thought if I had been a Russian I would have been inclined to show him my dissident face, if only to avoid disappointing him. His expulsion from the Soviet Union at first ...”

“... Afew​ months after the end of the Second World War, Stephen Spender returned to Germany. His plan was to contact German intellectuals. This was not very fruitful: most were dead or in exile, and Ernst Jünger, whom he did meet, evaded his invitation to show unqualified guilt for the Nazi past. But then Spender was asked to reopen libraries in the British zone of occupation, having first purged them of their Nazi staff and Nazi literature ...”

“... a war on Iraq are a whiplash to the governments bent on it. They include, in any case, many too young to have been compromised by its precedents. But if the movement is to have staying power, it will have to develop beyond the fixations of the fan club, the politics of the spectacle, the ethics of fright. For war, if it comes, will not be like Vietnam. It ...”

“... of converting between them. Travelling through France just before the Revolution, Arthur Young was distressed at the ‘infinite perplexity of the measures’ used: ‘They differ not only in every province, but in every district and almost every town.’ A quarter of a million distinct units of weights and measures were employed in different parts ...”

“... that make the most exciting showing at the Academy. Though he worked in Scotland as a boy and a young man, and later pioneered the tours of Wales that became such a standby for artists in search of the picturesque and sublime, his real heartland was – at least on the showing of this exhibition – the Home Counties: Windsor, Virginia Water, Luton Hoo, the ...”

“... of character, largely absent from his earlier books, which he struggled with: women, Americans, young people. But the real problem with Sisman’s book is that at a certain point the reader is banished from Cornwell’s life. In 1968, he met Jane Eustace, who worked in publishing as a foreign rights manager. Described as ‘modest and retiring’ but ...”

“... side looked on this with favour. But how could the exchangees have resisted? Not only were they young, they were the only resident foreigners who lived side by side with Russians, making them the envy of diplomats and journalists holed up in foreigners’ compounds. What fascinated the contributors to Adventures in Russian Historical Research was how ...”

“... controversy; ‘’Tis enough if I divide the world,’ he told his apprehensive Yorkshire friend Stephen Croft. This interweaving of life and fiction during Sterne’s last years is a godsend to the literary biographer. Yet there remains a big problem: what to do with all those years of obscurity. Ross’s major predecessor as a Sterne biographer, Arthur ...”