“... fear of stimulating anti-semitism turned Leo Frank into a gentile Yankee businessman. But Robert Rossen, the young Jewish Communist who adapted the story for the screen, didn’t forget what he saw as his own betrayal of the Jews. A decade later, directing the first Hollywood Jewish/black buddy film, Body and Soul, Rossen made the last shot of They ...”

“... or the heady jouissance of sexual pleasure, but of anticipating one’s death by living in the service of others. It is this which Heidegger lamentably misses, in his failure to link what he calls Mitsein – living with others – with the authenticity of being resolute for death. The latter is then debased to a kind of solitary heroism, with unsavoury ...”

“... what she conducts, from the day Chatwin walked into her office at Cape in 1976 to his memorial service in 1989 at the Greek Cathedral in Moscow Road, West London. There is, of course, a long detour to browse the greater part of his life, before they met. The story of a relationship between a successful writer and an editor can be told by either, but ...”

“... in colour with charging Highlanders, ‘sporrans abristle’. Newbolt’s sons survived active service, though one had severe shell-shock about which his father unsympathetically commented, ‘I wish his hands wouldn’t shake so,’ lamenting also that he had got an extension of leave on medical grounds. ‘I’m sorry that he isn’t doing more for his ...”

“... a bay), William Baffin (who became an island) and Vitus Bering (who became a strait). He describes Robert Peary claiming the North Pole for America, and how, to keep up the morale of his men, Richard Collinson erected a billiard table on the sea-ice of Cambridge Bay. The table was fashioned from snow blocks, the cushions from walrus skin stuffed with ...”

“... dissertation on Manet was printed as a special issue of Artforum in 1969 – put this prose to the service of art-historical scholarship. It might have been otherwise. While still in his twenties Fried had become a leading critic of contemporary art, an occupation which may not sound very different from being an art historian, though perhaps less ...”

“... connected) had crossed the Channel: Geoffrey Winthrop Young, George Trevelyan, Geoffrey Keynes, Robert Graves (a former pupil) and Rupert Brooke (a contemporary at Magdalene). Another friend, Lytton Strachey, was renowned for his obsession with Mallory’s good looks (he credited him ‘with the face of a Botticelli’). In April 1915, Mallory wrote to ...”

“... the usual upright, and excruciatingly painful, position. One of the most memorable passages in Robert Harris’s new novel, Imperium, describes the famous crucifixion of the six thousand slave comrades of the rebel Spartacus, who had been rounded up by the Romans in 71 BC. Harris imagines the victorious Roman general, Crassus, carefully choreographing this ...”

“... They represented, as Miller puts it, ‘a move away from an educational mission to a service orientation’. The move worked. By 1982, Waldenbooks and B. Dalton accounted for 24 per cent of all book sales in America. Crown, which came on the scene in 1977, was different: it set its horizons beyond the mall parking lot. It would do to main-street ...”

“... Davidian, and rushed back to tell everyone. When Jones got to the compound, Koresh was talking to Robert Rodriguez, an ATF agent who had gone undercover as a Davidian. Rodriguez left the building and informed his superiors, but they decided to go ahead with the raid anyway. By the time the ATF team arrived at the compound at around 9.40 a.m., the Davidians ...”

“... the bishops of Exeter, filling it with paintings and tapestries. There were some brutal evictions. Robert Cecil used ‘strong-arm tactics’ to acquire land from the bishop of Durham and hastily evicted the sitting tenant, Walter Raleigh. Arundel House, the most gorgeous palace of them all, was acquired by Alethea Howard and her husband, the earl of ...”

“... of Maximilian Aue, who served as an SS officer in the elite Sicherheitsdienst (SD) intelligence service. Aue witnessed and took part in the ‘final solution of the Jewish problem’, from the firing-squad slaughters beginning in 1941 through to the extermination camps of Operation Reinhard and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Brought up partly in Provence and so ...”

“... the Tom and Viv bits which we are all likely to home in on.’ In 2022, with the second volume of Robert Crawford’s sensitive biography, it’s the Tom and Em bits.This is unfortunate: Eliot after ‘The Waste Land’ is a rich study of the period from 1922 until Eliot’s death in 1965 – years that contained much besides a complicated love ...”

“... Both phrases are perfectly clear, yet each is as far as possible from what the insufferable Robert Nye commends in the diction of Grigson: ‘how close that idiom comes to living speech’. Much virtue in that ‘living’! For Gurney, the life that there is in English speech has been injected into it by lonely, learned and masterfully artificial ...”

“... the year Clarke returned to Ireland, a book called Sidelights on the Home Rule Movement, by Sir Robert Anderson, a police commissioner, was published – it helped inspire Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent. The relevant passage was an account of a conversation between Gladstone’s home secretary, Sir William Harcourt, and a police chief. While Clarke was ...”