“... legitimate children fathered an illegitimate son who died during the Second World War. In this, he may have been following ancestral precedent: family legend had it that the Reeds were descended from the bastard son of an 18th or 19th-century Earl of Dudley. Henry senior’s other enthusiasms included reading, but the literary abilities of his son Henry ...”

“... and brightly conveyed. Although the skills of a television journalist and those of an author may not be identical, there is a lot to be said for economical exposition in any format and many of the direct quotations from interviews sink home with the incisiveness of sound-bites. Some of this may be little more than ...”

“... the rest of the century. Two other recent publications, confronting the same facts, reflect and may reinforce the change of mood described above. Marmor, Mashaw and Harvey’s excellent book begins with the statement: ‘This book has a simple message: America’s social welfare efforts are taking a bum rap.’ They continue: ‘The vision of social welfare ...”

“... In Europe the health-seeker may still go barefoot in dew-treading meadows, as enjoined by Father Kneipp, or sniff the gentle mist from rows of brine-soaked hedges, as at Bad Kreuznach, or wallow in the black mud laid on at almost any decent spa. What the British call sea-bathing is available as thalassotherapy, or, with added sand, as thalassopsammotherapy ...”

“... most stimulating paper is one by Bernhard Decker which speculates on how anxiety about idolatry may have determined changes in form and style in the German altarpiece before it led to iconoclasm. He points out that reliquary sculpture – originally gold-plated wooden figures or busts containing relics – were less likely to ‘prompt acts of physical ...”

“... mysticism that took hold all over Europe at the time, and Ireland was not immune. Hindsight may regard it as unhealthy, largely because of the fate of that generation, but also because it had links, now visible, with post-war Fascism. In his last years Yeats felt a tug in that direction, though for all his wild-old-man sword-waving he seems very ...”

“... The imagery of the last stanza of one derives from black-and-white Russian movies. There may have been a further reason, not mentioned by Isherwood, why we were drawn to the young Germans of ten years after 1918. This is to be found in a poem of the First World War, Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’, in which he imagines a conversation between ...”

“... love with the Wild Man – and Wild Woman – right in the room; and if we are those lovers, we may feel certain body cells turn gold that we thought were made entirely of lead.’ So there will be that: Wild Sex. Bly knows about women’s ascensionism, but he thinks: ‘it is appropriate for women to describe it.’ ‘We will confine ourselves here to ...”

“... of the Gothic carry us too far beyond the simple devoutness that responded to the terror. That may be why the good old horror film, in its pre-sophisticated stage, was more faithful than literature has since been to the properties of Gothic which Mrs Barbauld had in mind. Her ‘terror’ may have been a simple form of ...”

“... fact that ‘the whole world is ill’ required of him a great deal of public speaking. What now may seem more important, he wrote Heartbreak House, published in 1919 and first performed in 1920. He was now close to being as famous as it is possible for a writer to be; and without ceasing to live as an honest man he did nothing to change that. One the whole ...”

“... man, the joyful reaction of the crowd, and the adherence to a form of ritual (however corrupt it may have been) – all these set the execution of Alain de Monéys apart from ordinary murder. The vast majority of the mob, having come to the fairground from beyond the immediate village, did not know then victim. Familiarity ...”

“... that the Henry Moore Foundation might help a publisher, so a number of old conversations may yet see print. I was an inquisitive, I hope scholarly ghost. The project was to write a history of the sculpture department at St Martin’s School of Art. Anthony Caro invited me to do it, and the idea was that the book would be a tribute to Frank ...”

“... tentative gull’s feet; tide of familial happiness seeps in. But although the narrative formula may be trite (Little House on the Prairie Goes to Newfoundland; The Waltons Put Out to Sea), this energetic, anarchic, quirky novel is not. We are seduced, in part, by the characters; in part by the writer’s intelligence and wit (one character, an expat ...”

“... blow themselves apart playing with them. Visitors who travel further up the pot-holed road in what may be Xieng Khouang’s only taxi, an ageing Russian Volga, will have no trouble spotting Laos’s second claim to international renown: opium. At Nong Het, close to the Vietnamese border, a woman is weeding a field of purple and white opium poppies in front of ...”

“... meet Hittites these days in European cities. Gilman implicitly makes the point that self-hatred may be, among other things, a kind of self-protection, part of the emotional rigmarole of survival in largely hostile countries. The history of the Jews, as of any dispersed people, has been the history of their obvious, and not so obvious, difference from the ...”