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“... the syndrome now known as ‘chronic traumatic encephalopathy’ (CTE). Eight years later Dr Edward Carroll Jr wrote an article called ‘Punch Drunk’ in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences: ‘No head blow is taken with impunity, and each knock-out causes definite and irreparable damage. If such trauma is repeated for a long enough period, it ...”

“... In the years before the outbreak of the First World War, the volatile and charismatic lawyer Edward Carson, together with his energetic deputy James Craig, mobilised Ulster Protestants of all classes to resist Home Rule. Carson, who had served as solicitor-general in Lord Salisbury’s Administration, colluded in the illegal shipment of 25,000 rifles and ...”

“... a kind of mutual respect. ‘Don’t touch the cloud-dweller,’ Stalin is supposed to have said about him, and the assumption is that the tyrant, who had a nose for such things, sensed that Pasternak was no threat to him but was admiring him in his own peculiar way. The poet Gumilov, Akhmatova’s husband, had actually taken part in an anti-Bolshevik ...”

“... to an Elizabethan bishop, ‘if London were reformed, all the realm would soon follow.’ As was said of another metropolis and the cause of Catholic Counter-Reformation: ‘to purge Rome would be to purge the world.’ From this it follows that London and the Reformation contains at one and the same time an important account of national events, from a ...”

“... of this early instance of self – mortification other than to note that a Jewish friend said of it: ‘That’s very Jewish.’ All one learns of Joseph’s marriage, which took place in 1951, is that his bride was an American and photogenic and that in 1978 a single-sentence statement recorded in the press that they had ‘decided to live ...”

“... misleading. It is better understood as having been distilled from ‘I must be seeing things’, said seriously, and with a fair amount of stress on the ‘I must’. The greatest difficulty for the poet is how to go on being one. Randall Jarrell set it out like this at the end of his essay on Stevens: ‘A man who is a good poet at 40 may turn out to be a ...”

“... You are going much too fast,’ Mrs Thatcher said on the News at One on Friday, 10 November, ‘first Poland, then Hungary, then – er, Czechoslovakia, now Eastern Germany ... ’. Heigh-ho, this was Neville Chamberlain’s ‘Czechoslovakia’ all over again, the far-away country of which we know little. The second half of the sentence was omitted from the television interview shown later that day ...”

“... Brecht’s Fear and Misery in the Third Reich on bicycles. We are not told what the critics said about this event. Was it an experience to lift the soul on wings, a mind-blowing epiphany? Or was it in the same class as a file of messenger boys delivering pizzas on unicycles? The author, Pryor Dodge, withholds his own opinion. He is introduced to us, not ...”

“... growled. ‘It’s all male power. It’s as bad as Moscow.’ He nodded towards an obelisk, and said: ‘Why do they have a prick but no cunt? You have enough fucking feminists in this country – why don’t they protest? Why don’t they insist on erecting a cunt, in memory of – I don’t know – Annie Oakley, Marilyn Monroe, the witches of ...”

“... Chronicle, Melbourne, who was Prime Minister, wrote: ‘In this sort of matter there is much to be said upon both sides. A Minister has a great advantage in stating his own views to the public and if Palmerston in the Syrian affair had not as devoted an assistant as the Morning Chronicle, he would hardly have been able to maintain his course or carry through ...”

“... This feeling of forever being somewhere in-between was Ford’s ongoing curse, or so he would have said. And of course the more he pondered it, the worse it got. The either/ors piled up, sometimes to breaking-point. Was he English or German? Pre-1914 he could take his pick, and did – but now, in wartime, a Hueffer could only be a spy. Another spur, this, to ...”

“... neither could the king. This, of course, was a fiction. The king was well informed about what was said and done in the Commons, but he couldn’t be informed officially. This policy had kept more than one member out of prison during the reign of Charles I, and the Commons plea for freedom of speech, made at the beginning of each session by the speaker, was a ...”

“... in some ways very intense, was in reality extremely limited. The partisans of the Administration said, ‘If not now, when?’ and their opponents replied: ‘Why not later?’ The partisans of the Administration said there would be fewer body bags if Saddam was hit at once, and their opponents replied feebly that all body ...”

“... by authorial complaints against Olwyn Hughes, Ted Hughes and the Estate (e.g. David Holbrook, Edward Butscher) or have come to nothing (e.g. Lois Ames, Harriet Rosenstein). Most of the book-length literary criticism is unimpressive. There isn’t much to choose, for example, between Margaret Dickie Uroff (‘As they developed, Plath came to locate herself ...”

“... of her own life: ‘Nothing has happened but loneliness.’ Stevie Smith would not, I think, have said that, though she was much aware of loneliness. Her life was uneventful – if one supposes that D’Annunzio and Hemingway (or Shelley and Byron) led the sort of lives writers should eventfully lead. But Stevie’s life (and I now fall, as Barbera/McBrien ...”