“... 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 ...”

“... need. So the wealthy Edmund Waller, who wrote panegyrics to Oliver Cromwell and then praised Charles II, is given faintish praise as a refiner of English verse. During his exile in France, Waller lived ‘with great splendour and hospitality; and from time to time amused himself with poetry, in which he sometimes speaks of the rebels, and their ...”

“... Samuel Parr (‘the Whig Dr Johnson’), the great liberal advocate Thomas Erskine, R.B. Sheridan, Charles James Fox, the novelists and dramatists Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, Amelia Alderson, Mary Hays and Charlotte Smith, as well as Godwin’s publisher George Robinson and a number of dissenting ministers who, largely forgotten now, were important ...”

“... drafts of work in progress. The leading members of the group, which included the Anglican writer Charles Williams during the years of the Second World War, also seem to have shared a form of conservatism – one with Tory anarchist leanings – that was more cultural than political (and was the more conservative for seeing itself as apolitical). Tolkien and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sanitary wear and rags for cleaning. The German high-fashion industry continued nevertheless, the hope being that it would generate some national revenue to help finance the war. Luxurious feminine designs were created for export only, and glossy photos were published in German fashion magazines. Guenther shows us some of these ornate ensembles, which look ...”

“... them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.’ There might presumably have been some hope for Lewis had his eyes merely been those of a successful rapist. Lewis describes his visit to Pound’s Paris studio in the first of his two volumes of autobiography, Blasting and Bombardiering (1937). No one answered his knock, but the door was open, so he ...”

“... Ursprung of Haydn’s material, where its handling is so far from childish. Here he anticipates Charles Rosen’s Classical Style, which has always seemed to be a brilliant codification and tidying up of the rich overview implicit in Tovey’s sprawling oeuvre, in which extraordinary hints and insights are thrown out to left and right in the most hurried ...”

“... 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 ...”