“... discrimination in defence employment, and so avert A. Philip Randolph’s threatened mass march on Washington. (Randolph was President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping-Car Porters; here, and not as objects of Sumner Welles’s desire, lies the political significance of these black workers.) The young man with whom Eleanor was intimate, Joe Lash, former head of ...”

“... small yet reliable magazine Antichrist. This Ravelston – some composite of Sir Richard Rees and John Middleton Murry – was a hedonistic yet guilt-ridden dilettante, good in a pinch, and soft on poets, but too easily embarrassed by brute exigence. Saul Bellow – who has already shown a vulnerability to exigent poets in his wonderful Humboldt’s Gift ...”

“... they lived mostly in expatriate circles, but their friendships with other foreigners, including John McNair, the ILP representative in Barcelona, were rewarding. Lois was close to Eileen O’Shaughnessy (‘nice but very vaguish when she talks and is eternally smoking cigarettes’), who spent most of her time in the city while Orwell was at the front. In ...”

“... Mediterranean and the Danube basin were for a long time privileged zones – the terrains of St John Philby and Robert Byron, of Norman Douglas and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, of R.W.Seton-Watson and Rebecca West. Sorties farther afield – like Peter Fleming’s expeditions to the Gobi or Matto Grosso – were fewer. Paradoxically, the vast expanse of the Empire ...”

“... paying the highest price in the loss of the lives of our young soldiers – almost alone. I’m John Kerry and I approved this message. In a world of instant projections and medium-is-the-message contemplations, commentary on the presidential race of 2004 might finish right there: Kerry’s style is downbeat, America-blaming, slightly depressing, while the ...”

“... of fashionable life. He thrilled at an expedition to view the huge painting by Emanuel Leutze of Washington crossing the Delaware, his excitement in the ‘wondrous flare of projected gaslight’ all the greater for his awareness that it would otherwise be the hour for bed. At home there was the large painting of Florence by Thomas Cole that covered half a ...”

“... had glowing reviews from commentators such as Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute in Washington DC, who wrote that the weapons had ‘transformed the strategic dynamic 180 degrees’ in Idlib in just five days. The enthusiasm is easy to fathom. Drones create their own marketing commercials in the form of the streaming video they transmit to their ...”

“... to understand what experis in other fields are saying. A few weeks earlier, the editor of Nature, John Maddox, reported on a conference about scientific journals and electronic publishing. Now that electronic mail (email) allows instant publication, printed journals carry a time penalty. Moreover, as email contributions and commentary appear side by side they ...”

“... when I first studied American literature in the late Fifties. There were books by black writers, Washington, Douglass, Du Bois and so on, but they came from another, very regrettable area of American experience – slavery – and thus were in some unspecified way apart from the literary mainstream.) Fishkin renews the claim that ‘Mark Twain helped open ...”

“... fresh nation ... with one more possession of beauty’. The translator, therefore, can resemble a Washington or a Jefferson as much as a traditional monarch, and like Aeneas he plants the old gods in a new place and a new language. The Virgilian theme and the language question are subtly explored in Brian Friel’s Translations, a play that was first ...”

“... 20 May, is the date of Kent’s arrest. Where else does he slip up? He mentions that Knight and John le Carré knew one another, but doesn’t see fit to add that le Carré – under his real name, David Cornwell – illustrated one or two of Knight’s post-war publications (e.g. Talking Birds, 1961): a not uninteresting detail in a story that includes ...”

“... the New Hampshire Primary early in 1984, he had been a Senator for many years but the files of the Washington Post and the New York Times were empty. His sudden emergence as a serious contender for the Presidential nomination required a hurried attempt to investigate his past. It was only then that his change of name and the curious transformation of his ...”

“... Duomo; and the windswept David, painted on a leather shield now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. In a lost Assumption of the Virgin, it is said, he portrayed himself as Judas. There is no doubting Andrea’s impact among his contemporaries: a challenging figure with a faintly lurid reputation. But was he also a murderer? According to the early ...”

“... and its mortifying consequences: arrest, imprisonment in the DTC in Pisa, and then, back in Washington, psychiatric examination, and transfer to St Elizabeth’s Federal Hospital for the Insane. In 1957, Forrest Read put forward the view that the movement within the Pisan Cantos from hell through purgatory to a glimpse of paradise recapitulated a ...”

“... ahead, and waited for them to make a move.The impetuosity of Allied generals, and their masters in Washington and Whitehall, was gradually tempered by this reality. Their armies soon faced another string of defences – the Gustav Line – transecting Italy from the Garigliano River in the west to Ortona in the east, through the Apennines and across the ...”