“... hands) I’m from the Standard.Leo: Yes, I know.Mr Birbeck: I’ve brought a photographer. I hope you don’t mind? We thought a little study of you in your own home would be novel and interesting.Leo: (bitterly) I’m sure it would.Birbeck proceeds to ask Leo, a playwright who has just had another successful West End first night, what his other plays ...”

“... and Claud was sent to school at Berkhamstead. The headmaster during the First World War was Charles Greene, father of Graham and a high-minded radical, and Cockburn first saw political violence on Armistice Day, when a drunken mob burst into the school accusing Greene (quite wrongly) of having been ‘anti-war’. But the experiences that followed were ...”

“... Beckett, Happy DaysThe Irish propensity for violence is well known; at least to the English.Charles Townshend, Political Violence in IrelandIn 1934, Marina Tsvetaeva wrote an essay called ‘Poets with History and Poets without History’. All poets, she said, belong to one or the other of these categories, and it becomes clear that the poet with ...”

“... apologetics for liberal society. We need an apologetics for liberalism which revolves around the hope that culture as a whole can be ‘aestheticised’ rather than around the Enlightenment hope that it might be ‘scientised’. Liberal politics is best suited to a culture whose hero is the strong poet rather than the ...”

“... Butt, who became a regular dinner guest at Wilde’s house in Westland Row, and the novelists Charles Lever and Sheridan Le Fanu. He also travelled to London and then to Vienna and Berlin to pursue his medical studies; he visited Prague, Munich and Brussels. In 1843 he published Austria, Its Literary, Scientific and Medical Institutions, and in 1849 a ...”

“... the Two Acts in December 1795, and in that sense – as part of an alliance which stretched from Charles James Fox through the genteel supporters of the Society for Constitutional Information to the largely shopkeeper and artisan LCS – he did perform a leading role. With a scrupulous sense of this borderline distinction, Francis Place noted down Frend as ...”

“... other how intelligent they are, more subtlety than this might be expected of them, but we can only hope it. What were Adam Verver’s views on the great Free Trade debate, on woman suffrage, on child labour? We do not know. It is almost as if James wanted to protect his cherished creations from our knowledge of the banalities they would utter if he once let us ...”

“... Lionel Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel and Bertolt Brecht rubbed shoulders with Peter Lorre, Charles Laughton, Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx and many others. Brecht and Christopher Isherwood had briefly lived and worked in the cottage where I was pounding out the first draft of an adaptation in collaboration ...”

“... early stories emanated a Kodachrome glow, pictures pasted in a scrapbook preserving youth, hope and trim figures, with intimations of distress ahead. Progressive pundits didn’t need to make the case for abundance in the Ike-JFK-LBJ era because abundance was everywhere apparent, at least in Leave It to Beaver land. ‘America is a vast conspiracy to ...”

“... English by Shelley Frisch. (The first volume, covering Kafka’s youth, was written last in the hope that the papers in the Max Brod estate – a mysterious suitcase full of documents – would exit the apartment of the septuagenarian daughter of Max Brod’s presumed lover, but the destiny of those papers remains in legal dispute.) Part of what is so ...”

“... emotions; on others, he granted dogs, horses, monkeys and magpies a range of emotions, including hope, fear and joy, none of which, of course, required thought. The Cartesian animal-machine wasn’t just alive; it was also, in some versions, a sensible and a feeling thing. There were later Cartesians who enthusiastically dispensed with these nuances about ...”

“... loomed over this mixed population. Readers enrolling on Sante’s guided tour should abandon hope at the gate if they’re expecting to go on to purgatory and paradise. For Sante hell is too invigorating to leave behind: murder, intoxication, libertinage, art and revolution are sublime forms of self-expression. At the head of this parade is the rogue ...”

“... of an especially brutal form of slavery – wouldn’t submit to bondage again. The French general Charles Leclerc promised to subdue Saint-Domingue within two weeks, but nine months later he was dead, along with tens of thousands of his soldiers. In 1804, Haiti became the second republic in the New World and the first Black one. The second article of its ...”

“... of stationers, enabled authors to sell the copyright of their writings to publishers, who might hope to benefit from the right to print them for an extended period. In 1714 he negotiated a contract with Bernard Lintot (who was hoping to buy himself a poet who could rival John Dryden in merit and popularity) for a translation of Homer. This was probably the ...”

“... and, as the title intimates, in the analogy with the Victorian poverty investigated by Engels and Charles Booth. Here is the Indian lowness scanted in Naipaul’s book. An Area of Darkness is prone to India’s painful sights, and is eloquent about their effect on the Western visitor, with his burden of disorientation, anxiety and embarrassment; I can’t ...”