“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Cambridge, where he met Brooke, Ka Cox and Gwen Darwin, the daughter of a don and granddaughter of Charles Darwin. Later, both Darwin and Raverat studied art at the Slade. Virginia Woolf was fascinated by these Neo-Pagan entanglements, the sense of Rabelaisian sexuality, the counter-cultural world created around Brooke ...”

“... vicious satires against his betters and wound up raving; or the short, fat, gouty corrector Charles de la Motte, described as a ‘pygmy’, a ‘Lilliputian’ and ‘that little figure of papier-mâché’ by the contemporaries who hurled epithets at him with all the zest and accuracy of a literary darts team aiming at a target adorned with the face ...”

“... Is Mailer not, in Vidal’s throwaway line, one of the three Ms, along with Henry Miller and Charles Manson, ‘conditioned to think of women as, at best, breeders of sons, at worst, objects to be poked, humiliated, killed’? (His initial defence, if that is what it was, was to compile the table ‘Number of times married, Number of children, Number of ...”

“... were naturalised. They certainly played a part in bringing the Liberals back into power: in the hope that they would repeal the Aliens Act of 1905, which had so severely cut down the tide of immigration. But Dr Alderman is careful not to attribute too much to the Jewish vote, while at the same time noting the Jewish interest in issues which had nothing to ...”

“... adequate rejoinder from the British side so far has been Frank Kermode’s brilliant 1977-78 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, now published under the title The Genesis of Secrecy. Although fully aware of the subtleties of the deconstructivist case, he has yet entered a firm non placet to any form of that theory which tends towards a nihilism of ...”

“... argument for the Hexter case that there really was popular opposition to the proto-absolutism of Charles I. In Virginia there was no community sense, there were no autonomous villages, no towns: settlers with no shared roots in England spread themselves as widely as possible to grow the maximum amount of tobacco for the market, regardless of danger from ...”

“... anything else a pitiable people.’ However, the ‘Radical working man’ came along, supported Charles Bradlaugh and went on to found the Labour Party. ‘The men of 1946’, Cole and Postgate concluded, were cleverer still – look at how their earnest quest for information had forced their oppressors to ‘improve’ the technique of ‘deluding the ...”

“... given as a gift by the Emperor Bahadur Shah to the Portuguese, who then offered them as a dowry to Charles II at the time of his marriage to Catherine of Braganza. What was one to do with such a dowry? Well, through a process of reclamation, the seven fishing islands became Bombay. As Saleem Sinai says (after reciting the opening stanza of the Cathedral and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was arrested for participating in the Paris Commune, and in jail became friends with a musician, Charles de Sivry, whose mother – Antoinette-Flore Mauté – was a talented pianist and teacher who claimed to have been a pupil of Chopin’s (as it happened, she was also Verlaine’s mother-in-law). It was Madame Mauté who recognised Debussy’s exceptional ...”

“... friend Henry Fonda that he was a natural actor. Carole Lombard, who had worked with Fredric March, Charles Laughton, William Powell and John Barrymore, thought him more remarkable than any of them. On screen, his name appeared as James Stewart, and he worked hard at every detail. He was a canny businessman. Before the Second World War, he invested in a small ...”

“... quango with laudable aims was not ‘a call to revolutionary change in Nigeria’ – some hope! – but just another cover for stealing money, and lots of it. Ken Wiwa is also coy about how his father made enough money, in an increasingly depressed economy, to send four children to top-notch public schools in England – as though there were no decent ...”

“... 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 ...”