“... King wanted to move palaces, he would not go through Paris, but had a path cut through the Bois de Boulogne, which was known afterwards as ‘the Riot Road’. It would be a stretch of the imagination to say that the events of the spring of 1750 prefigure those of the Revolutionary spring of 1789. But their quality of strangeness, their dark undertow of ...”

“... statement: ‘There is nothing clever or smart about being incomprehensible. The ordinary man in the street has his rights, just as the toffee-nosed élitists in Hampstead have theirs.’Other People was discussed in at least four broadcasts, two on radio (Kaleidoscope, Critics’ Forum), and two on TV (The South Bank Show, Did you see?), the second ...”

“... creation of a head of ‘story development’. The post of official fabulist was filled by Paul Hamill, who would play an inglorious role in the fabrication of the Dodgy Dossier of September 2002.We weren’t careful what we half-wished for. We did not anticipate the effects a free-flowing, direct, 24/7 style of communication would have on the quality ...”

“... as a political one, a lifeline to the corporate base of the fraying New Deal coalition: military de-escalation would free up public revenue for productive investment and tamp down the inflationary pressures that scared the bond managers of multinational banks, while the normalisation of international relations would open the USSR, Eastern Europe and China ...”

“... audience including, presumably, many straight readers. Perhaps a few more gay male writers – Paul Monette, David Leavitt and Armistead Maupin in the US, Alan Hollinghurst, Paul Bailey, Adam Mars-Jones in Britain – enjoy this crossover status. International comparisons, however, can be misleading, since they disguise ...”

“... or met almost everyone, cut a strikingly beautiful figure, became Exhibit A for Imagism. In The Man Who Died, D. H. Lawrence figured her as the Priestess of Isis. Follow as she travels to Greece on a boat with Havelock Ellis, finds herself in Egypt just when King Tut’s tomb is opened, gets photographed by Man Ray, has ...”

“... and hindsight, would find questionable. Pre-modern reasoning was more deductive than inductive: man was the measure of all things, geocentricity sidelined the sun and unseen forces were morally reflexive, harnessed to turbulent inner lives. These forces were personified as angels and demons and reified in the shape of heinous sinners, including heretics and ...”

“... art that would stand in a more intimate and vital relationship to the world of nature and to the man-made social environment’. (Smithson made arrangements of different-sized bins filled with varieties of stones or sand.) Nor does he like the work of Charles Simonds, who had films made of himself naked, lying, or writhing about, in clay – a ‘telltale ...”

“... the stern and reactionary Gregory XVI. The old pope had died at the age of eighty; the new man, who adopted the name Pius IX, was 54, with a warm personality and a cheerful, winning manner. Whereas Gregory had begun his reign in 1831 with a campaign of violent repression, Pius’s first official act was to proclaim a blanket amnesty for the political ...”

“... of the Industrial Revolution. To Marx and Engels Owenism was merely a moralistic utopian cul-de-sac in the pre-history of scientific socialism. Whigs, Marxists and Fabians have generally concurred in consigning the Owenites to History’s old curiosity shop. Robert Owen, wrote the Webbs, was a political ‘simpleton’ who had ‘inflated’ the working ...”

“... a famous and idealised older woman fails to live up to the needs of a younger protégée it is de rigueur nowadays for the latter to rage in print at the cruelty of her faithless idol. Mommie Dearest (1978), Christina Crawford’s high-kitsch account of her wretched childhood with her adoptive mother Joan Crawford, is the archetype here – the first and ...”

“... when he went to Rome: he was, as he put it in his memoir A Spiritual Aeneid (1918), like the dozy man who had ‘mistaken a pile of bed-clothes for a polar bear’. Knox, who supported himself as a priest by writing detective stories, liked a clincher. Yet although he presented his conversion as the healing of a self’s divisions, most of his story was still ...”

“... When Captain Paul Voulet presented his plan for a new expedition to the minister of colonies in January 1898 he was accorded a good reception. He was, after all, a promising young officer whose previous mission to French Sudan had shown exemplary firmness towards the natives, and only a few months earlier the president of the republic, Félix Faure, had given him an audience ...”

“... whole of Great Britain to the remarkable point of being officially boycotted (as if I were a one-man enemy country)’, and his memoir wasn’t published in the UK. The paperback I read must have been bought by my father when he visited America.What struck me most at the time was Hecht’s account of his period as a Zionist activist in the 1940s (this, or at ...”

“... only Cuban matters but those of all nations came into Castro’s critique, from the insufficient de-Nazification of West Germany to French atrocities in Algeria. In later decades, his speeches would become gruelling national rituals, but almost to the end they remained a reliable point of resistance to US triumphalism.Castro’s exit​ from New York was ...”