“... virginal blood and of defloration in primitive societies’. The chief proponent of this view was Edward Westermarck (1862-1939), who, in his monumental History of Marriage, begun in 1891, furnished partial evidence for his theory from Herodotus, and from Brazil, the Caribbean, Senegal, Libya, Morocco, Kurdistan, Cambodia and Malabar, while steadfastly ...”

“... other remark deserves to be immortalised, which Oppenheimer himself later judged the best thing said at the time. When the blast subsided, the physicist Kenneth Bainbridge, in charge of the test, turned to Oppenheimer and declared: ‘Now we’re all sons of bitches.’ In general, however, the test was a rhetorical dud. After the physicist Samuel Allison ...”

“... The historian Edward Hallett Carr died on 3 November 1982, at the age of 90. He had an oddly laconic obituary in the Times, which missed out a great deal. If he had died ten years before, his death would probably have been noticed a great deal more, for Carr was an eminent left-wing historian, had a huge record of publication, and had embarked, 35 years before his death, on a History of Soviet Russia which has been described as ‘monumental’ and ‘a classic ...”

“... to knock Middlesbrough. Still, they wanted to know what I thought: ‘You can be honest,’ they said. Or some of them said. My B&B was a Victorian villa whose front garden was tended and walled. To get into town each day I walked down the Linthorpe Road: it’s the arterial road, where fights happen on a Saturday night. I ...”

“... 1905: Philip, who is still with us, in 1915. The portraitist says, rather oddly, that he cannot be said to have known his brother until he was about seven and his subject 17; as they were both living in the same house, with stable parents, he must mean that such knowledge could begin only with the age of reason. From then on, ‘the only prolonged period of ...”

“... and in at the back door of the West End Central Police Station. ‘I there arrested him, and he said, “I thought we were going to your place,” and that was true!’Butcher’s colleague PC Darlington offers more detail about the atmosphere in the toilets, the ‘deathly quiet’, no one urinating, ‘practically everyone you see will be masturbating ...”

“... we could reasonably wish to know about his life. About his poetry there is more still to be said, but one of the merits of this book is that the writer clearly points the way to anyone who may feel like such an undertaking. One of the reasons Bridges has been neglected is probably the prevalent though quite inaccurate idea that his life was serene and ...”

“... write novels, do the Post Office, and go out three days.’ ‘In some coming perfect world,’ he said on another occasion, ‘there will be hunting 12 months in the year.’ An acquaintance once said in praise of Browning that he ‘wasn’t at all like a damned literary man’. Neither was Trollope. His collected letters ...”

“... child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex’. Her father, Edward O’Connor, was an estate agent, and she grew up in a four-storey house in Savannah, Georgia, but she seems to have chafed against the gentility of her surroundings. ‘I was born disenchanted,’ she later said. Aged ...”

“... Mangan’s temperament than in his poems and essays: Mangan’s ‘purely defensive reserve’, he said, ‘is not without dangers for him, and in the end it is only his excesses that save him from indifference’. Joyce recalled the passage, then already famous, in which Walter Pater completed his ‘imaginary portrait’ of Watteau: ‘He has been a sick man ...”

“... labyrinthine plot – ‘If you come in five minutes after this picture begins,’ the trailer said, ‘you won’t know what it’s all about’ – produced more meaning than it ever intended, or could hope to contain. The plot at its simplest: Sergeant Raymond Shaw (played by Harvey) is a Korean War veteran, winner of a Medal of Honor, who, along with ...”

“... into being ‘after native men and women were kicked out of their homes to make way for one of Edward I’s imposing ring of castles’. It may have happened seven hundred years ago, but it still grates. Today the English come to Wales not with weapons but with bank balances that enable them to buy second homes. And there is still resistance. Between 1979 ...”

“... Auden appears wrapped up in himself and a cigarette: ‘I kept thinking,’ Hockney reportedly said afterwards, ‘if his face looks like this, what must his balls look like?’ Not everyone was struck in quite that way, but everyone was struck, and Auden himself realised that he had not lost his looks so much as become photogenic in a new and unexpected ...”

“... 14 in February 1974, tripling its popular vote. Although tempted by the prospect of coalition with Edward Heath’s Conservatives (Labour had emerged as the largest party, but without an overall majority), Thorpe was persuaded by his parliamentary party not to do a deal without a guarantee of electoral reform. He left his successors good cause to credit him ...”

“... in. He was chairman of Tory Action, which campaigned so successfully in 1974 and 1975 to remove Edward Heath as Tory leader and replace him with Thatcher. He even stood for Parliament himself. But he was, as the memo makes clear, deeply suspicious of anything which smacked of democracy. It threw up waverers, compromisers, ready phrases and flashing ...”