“... or infringed by a new male cult whose founding fathers were Cromwell, William of Orange and Edward Carson, and whose godhead is incarnate in a rex or caesar in a palace in London.‘The fury of Irish Republicanism is associated with a religion like this,’ he had said a year or two earlier, referring to the Mother Earth paganism described in The Bog ...”

“... of Hanson, an adviser to Cable & Wireless (of which the former Secretary of State for Trade, Lord Young, is head) and ICL, and a director of both Torrey Investments Inc. and the UK-Japan 2000 Group. Tom King became a director of the Electra Investment Trust after he had left his post as Defence Secretary. The Register of Members’ Interests for April 1994 ...”

“... and in June 1951 sailed to France with his wife of four months, Patsy Southgate. His cover – young writer at work on a novel – had the virtue of being true. He was 24 and the Atlantic Monthly had just published his first short story.‘Sadie’ is set in rural Georgia and narrated by a man called Webster who goes to a stable yard because he wants to ...”

“... a wealthy client, a 21-year-old Euro-drifter he met in Los Angeles, a flight attendant, and his young daughter Sally’s teacher. Betty suffers from chronic depression at a time when neither the diagnosis nor the pills to smother it are easy to come by. But what, here, is undermining what? What if, with or against our will, we aren’t shocked by the ...”

“... model came along in 1972 the tools used were Kaplan-Meier estimators, developed in 1958 after Edward Kaplan, working at Bell Labs on the problem of vacuum tube survival in transatlantic telephone cable repeaters, was put in touch with Paul Meier, who was working on cancer survival using a similar method.) The use of these techniques in medicine and in the ...”

“... Edward Said’s Orientalism, published in 1978, gave intellectuals and writers from once colonised nations (themselves often migrants, like Said) a language that liberated and shackled in almost equal measure. Said’s critical perspective gave both Europeans and non-Europeans a shrewder and more unillusioned sense of the subterranean ways in which power operated through the cultures of empire, and is now so familiar that it’s easily taken for granted ...”

“... books, collectors and readers. Every good secondhand bookshop offered guidance for neophytes: A. Edward Newton’s chatty books about his bookish adventures; Holbrook Jackson’s erudite Anatomy of Bibliomania, a comprehensive treatment of obsessive book-buying in the manner of Robert Burton; and sometimes even a copy of Carter and Pollard’s Inquiry into ...”

“... now drawing to a close. Perhaps the symbolic moment came with the visit to South Africa of Senator Edward Kennedy at the invitation of Tutu and Boesak. Had things gone as in the old days, the latter would have been able to enhance their local position by basking in the charismatic shadow of such a glamorous symbol of Western liberal opinion. But at this point ...”

“... elegant, his head held back a bit as he talked, as though you were a menu.’ From Light Years, a young girl smitten by love: ‘She could not eat, like a dog that has been sold.’ And there is another kind, the imagery of states of being. In The Hunters, he writes of disappointment: ‘There had been many ambitions … They were scattered behind him like ...”

“... eight stories we discover that their perceptions are like those of the drowsy, the lonely, the young, the distressed, that feeling and suffering, strength of feeling and bodily weakness, are potently related. In other words, we discover that Chekhov is a romantic writer. No one could mistake ‘The Steppe’ for an example of Chekhov’s ...”

“... naive, serious-minded and completely innocent girl’, was besotted with a portrait of the young Maxim Gorky.Until the late 1930s the Veger family had a busy and pleasant life, visiting their dacha in the Silver Forest and going to meetings of the Moscow Linguistic Circle. But, like many members of the intelligentsia, they fell foul of Stalin’s ...”

“... them is skilfully traced from the time when Owen was writing fully supportive references for the young Huxley, desirous of one of the few footholds in a poorly-paid scientific profession, to the time when Owen redesigned his dinosaurs to make sure they could not possibly fit Huxley’s phylogeny. Much of the fascination of Desmond’s story stems from the ...”

“... Israelis and to show that there were people with whom you could even organise a common front.’ Young, charismatic, friendly with Palestinians and the European left, the Matzpeniks shouted the anti-imperialist slogans heard in the streets of every modern metropolis except Tel Aviv, infuriating Israelis across the political spectrum. One right-wing ...”

“... and the notorious Professor Gebhardt carried out experimental transplants of bone and muscle on young women, leaving them badly injured. Babies who were born in the camp soon starved to death, their mothers too undernourished to feed them. By the end of the war, more than 25,000 women had died in Ravensbrück of starvation or illness, or had been ...”

“... of life. The message from the social margins was unequivocal. Those who died very poor died very young. In 1837 it was calculated that the average age at death of labourers was 38 in Rutland and 15 in Liverpool. The rich got richer as they got older because direct taxation was low (income tax peaked at 10 per cent during the war with France, and was ...”