“... act, where she appears in a simple dress, and yet one soon stops laughing, for every inch of that little figure lives and bewitches. Then her flattering and imploring and embracing; it is incredible what postures she can assume and how every limb and joint acts with her. What sort of ‘incredible’ postures? Poor Martha must have wondered. Elsewhere the ...”

“... with New York, Hamburg or Cologne with Berlin, Milan with Rome, Shanghai with Beijing. Vinen has little that is nice to say about his hometown, but he does finally conclude that Birmingham fits the bill, offering a sharp contrast to the power represented by the Roman colonial capital, London. A city in constant flux, with a bourgeoisie but no aristocracy or ...”

“... like? My father-in-law drank too much, argued too much, did not always show loving-kindness, did little in the way of charitable works, did not go to church (he was a Frenchman, a lapsed Catholic with little formal faith), and fiercely loved and protected his small family with a patriarchal passion, clearly Mediterranean ...”

“... his final say on the subject. This notion I thought grossly self-indulgent. There seemed to be little reason to believe that at his age he could suddenly have found anything interesting to say. And there surely were enough books on Shakespeare already, many of them dull, many of them silly, without the addition of another of which the primary motive was ...”

“... in at 560 pages. Merrill also wrote novels, plays and two memoirs. Born to enormous wealth, he had little to distract him from his writing apart from endless rounds of socialising and travel. His father was Charles ‘Good-time Charlie’ Merrill, cofounder of Merrill Lynch, who earned his moniker through prodigious accumulation of money and women. James ...”

“... campaign fundraiser for HRC. (Don’t ask, don’t tell.) Yes: Her Herness Herself! A friendly little plush-covered gathering for six hundred at some well-connected Palo Alto dweller’s farcically supersized manse! The next best thing to a private audience with the Hilldebeest! The Many-Horned Hillaria! (Bernie who?) Hellza-poppin’ H-Rod! (Not the ...”

“... seat, in Manchester North West, which had a substantial Jewish electorate. In December 1905 Arthur Balfour resigned after his short, fraught spell as Tory prime minister, and the new Liberal government called an election which they would win by a landslide. Having already spoken against Balfour’s Aliens Bill, which was designed to restrict Jewish ...”

“... had just been laid off from digging the Regent’s Canal, while another member of the committee, Arthur Thistlewood, urged them to bring ‘a spike-nail in the end of a stick or anything that would run into a fellow’s guts’. The subsequent riots were the worst since the Gordon riots of the 1780s, ending in chaos and a humiliating failed attempt to suborn ...”

“... up to and in The Sentimental Bloke did it to perfection, there is much enjoyment to be gained, but little edification about how the Australian lyric poet is to go about squaring his personal upbringing with the cultural heritage of the language in which he writes. It is easy enough now to say that Dennis did the wise thing. He set out to write popular art and ...”

“... into a description of the poems he hopes to write in the future, which include an epic on King Arthur. A Latinist as good as Milton might remind us (though his editors curiously do not) that the single usage of ‘turgidulus’ in classical poetry means something like ‘welling up with tears’ rather than ‘turgid with self-regard’. But once that ...”

“... verse translation of Homer before 1598 would have made Homer, or anyone with an ear, groan. Arthur Hall, from Grantham in Lincolnshire, had trundled out ten books of the Iliad in flat, heavy fourteeners in 1581. Hall did not work from the Greek, or even from the Latin, but from Hugues Salel’s French translation, which was in turn translated from a ...”

“... Black draws on the work of pioneering scholars such as William Leuchtenburg, Frank Freidel and Arthur Schlesinger, but he also incorporates a large amount of original material from the Roosevelt Library. And although Black credits a number of research assistants, the argument bears his personal stamp. For FDR, somewhat improbably, turns out to be his great ...”

“... alone in a London park for two hours during their elopement while he called on the critic Arthur Symons. ‘She thought he would not return,’ Ellmann says. Empson considered it a libel on Nora’s character to imply that she ran away with a man of whom she could think so dimly, and he was not persuaded when he tracked down the source in the ...”

“... Sixties, only a handful of books and films touched on the subject. Jewish intellectuals paid it little attention. No monuments or tributes marked the event. On the contrary, major Jewish organisations opposed such a memorialisation.Fear of alienating Gentiles by emphasising the distinctiveness of Jewish experience was always a problem for American (as well ...”

“... really foreign was happening on one of these family holidays was when we took shelter in a little café-cum-shop somewhere in North Wales and all the other customers were talking in a language I couldn’t understand. Although quite gratified in retrospect by this evidence of authentically local culture, my parents were clearly made uncomfortable by it ...”