“... unfashionable. Every generation wants to read Brecht afresh for itself. And some would agree with Henry Glade who writes in Bertolt Brecht: Political Theory and Literary Practice: ‘to be effective, Brecht’s plays have to be treated as classical texts, rigidly subjected to a contemporising process, in the manner demonstrated for Shakespeare by Jan ...”

“... had read Kerouac’s ambitious first novel, The Town and the City, she believed in the redemptive power of love, and she was pretty much open for anything. When Kerouac asked if he could stay at her place uptown, she said: ‘If you wish.’ The Kerouac Glassman met was not the Kerouac of later fame. At the time she was working for the literary agency which ...”

“... to death. He has a subdural haemorrhage, the doctors treat him for a sprained wrist. The victim, Henry Lamb (born it would seem for sacrifice), was in life a wimpish nonentity too timid to drop out of high school like the more enterprising 80 per cent of his peer group and his more vigorous companion in crime (a professional crack pedlar, as it turns ...”

“... me where it hurts.’ Diagnosis switched from subjective symptoms to objective signs – and power shifted from patient to physician. With the help of new diagnostic aids – stethoscopes, ophthalmoscopes and (exactly a century ago) X-rays – it became possible to allocate pain to specific bodily sites and pathological events. Rey retraces the ...”

“... yielded, to the love Which is a curse and sickness to me now. I am as one who sleeps beneath the power Of some wild dream; hopes, fears, and burning throbs Of strange delight, dizzy anxieties, And looks and words dwelt upon overmuch, Fill up my feverish circle of existence. … concealment preys upon me; life But animate with emotion, which must yet Be ...”

“... called the Third World, the hope of what the Russian Revolution might bring: Einstein, Lenin and Henry Ford. The advance of science was safe enough, but social crisis, intellectual danger and even its own progress increasingly pressed its practitioners into looking outside the laboratories to society. In the 1920s even the young USSR looked to ...”

“... deals in, painful, tender and life-shaping, and at her best she choreographs them with the power of implication that we admire in Henry James. It is the essence of Brookner to show the kinds of discernment, the sort of noticing, that can cause life to be both wonderful and agonising at the same time. ‘On the way to ...”

“... as chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet for several years. But no insatiable lust for power, no gift for intrigue, lay behind Brezhnev’s ascent. The point was that nobody in the highest echelons of the party was afraid of him. Many quite liked him and admired his hard work, though some thought he was a bit of a nincompoop. His great selling ...”

“... became an expert at Rand. Like many people, he doesn’t believe in the effectiveness of air power and takes the view that terror bombing imitates Nazi practices. He extended his service in the Marine Corps until the Suez Crisis had passed. When President Eisenhower forced the British and French to end ‘their Suez adventure’, he was ‘surprised and ...”

“... One of the odder political books I have read is The Abuse of Power, by James Margach, the veteran lobby correspondent of the Sunday Times. Published in 1978, the book was subtitled with a flourish: ‘The war between Downing Street and the media from Lloyd George to Callaghan’. For 40 years and more, Margach had enjoyed the confidence of prime ministers ...”

“... led many to label him an insular amateur of limited ambition. As incoming prime minister in 1905, Henry Campbell-Bannerman was reluctant to make Grey foreign secretary because of ‘his ignorance of foreign countries and foreign languages’, a judgment partly founded in the belief that Grey’s only Continental trip had amounted to two glum days in Paris.The ...”

“... African story he told were shown to be without empirical foundation. But none of this mattered. Henry Louis Gates got it right when he said in a 1998 interview that Roots is a ‘work of the imagination’. This may be the reason it captured the imagination of millions and why genealogical work began a new phase of expansion. New organisations were ...”

“... turn out to exemplify general tendencies. For some realist writers the best names are invisible. Henry James was a great fretter over names, as you might expect from someone who had the same names as his father, both of which could be interchangeably a surname or a first name. He wanted his characters’ names to have a tang of truth but not too much overt ...”

“... and crumpled up the paper and put it on the fire. I was ten years old when John Paul II came to power. My granny instantly adored him, loving his feudal side without reservation and simply ignoring the freedom-upholding aspect. The only thing she was truly agnostic about was politics: she never mentioned that, and her only concern when it came to sports was ...”

“... in the castle until the persecution subsided.The next century was, if possible, even worse. Henry III, his son Edward I and their enemy Simon de Montfort agreed on little else except the need to get rid of the Jews. De Montfort has clung on to his place in the English pantheon as the prime originator of parliamentary government. His role in murdering ...”