“... he was one of themselves. But Sonnet 20 proves conclusively that he was sexually normal.’ Hallet Smith said of Sonnet 20: ‘The attitude of the poet toward the friend is one of love and admiration, deference and possessiveness, but it is not at all a sexual passion’; Robert Giroux that the feelings in the poems ‘do not represent the feelings of an ...”

“... in the 1990s was self-imposed. But as Georgina Born makes clear in her definitive analysis of the John Birt and Greg Dyke eras, the consistent impetus came from government. It’s no surprise that Margaret Thatcher wanted to take on the BBC – if anything, the surprise is how long it took her. (In her first term, Thatcher’s main concern was with BBC ...”

“... had not always got on. ‘When it comes to lying,’ Mailer warbled to gossip-columnist Liz Smith of the New York Daily News in the mid-Eighties, ‘Larry Schiller makes Baron von Munchausen look like George Washington.’ Yet at the beginning of this new book there is an appreciation: ‘to Larry Schiller, my skilled and wily colleague in interview and ...”

“... refreshing: ‘A Cross swaying to and fro, a Christ with jerking limbs hanging onto it, a gaping John and a Madonna who in effect consists of a tangled clump of wool threads’. He does not wonder why such a completely unresolved drawing was preserved – unless it was by Michelangelo, in which case it would have been treasured as evidence of his tormented ...”

“... were looking at a grave, just covered.By contrast, despite her pleas and those of the C-in-C, Sir John French, it was not until the end of May 1915 that Asquith himself visited the Front – one more indication of how wrong his wife was when she claimed that ‘Henry was born for this war.’ The Brocks​ repeatedly tug our attention to Asquith’s hopeless ...”

“... compellingly ghastly ‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way’, a sort of homage to John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1968) only denser and even more postmodernly whorled: ‘For whom is the Funhouse a house? … For Tom Sternberg, the Funhouse is less a place of fear and confusion than (grimace) an idea, an ever-distant telos his arrival at ...”

“... on Germany in 1990, Trevor-Roper faced her down and tore her arguments to pieces. The historian John Habakkuk was an editor of Economic History Review in 1952 when Trevor-Roper’s onslaught against R.H. Tawney landed on his desk. He mused: ‘I find it difficult to decide whether T-R is a fundamentally nice person in the grip of a prose style in which it ...”

“... up the steeply banked terraces. But noble as the site appears, it is not entirely benign. The poet John Lucas, in 92 Acharnon Street, reminds us that the old Olympic stadium is where ‘the Colonels assembled schoolchildren for parades so that they might learn to salute the Greek flag.’ Across a never relenting stream of traffic, motorbikes cascading from ...”

“... transference was only, ultimately, a form of spoiling. Transference, the psychoanalyst Joseph Smith writes in Arguing with Lacan, was first understood as the capacity to misread or distort a new object in terms of prior objects. Analytic experience has taught us to see this first sketch of its meaning as transference in only the narrowest ...”

“... this rate generations must pass before Japan crosses the Maine line into our litigious world.Adam Smith, the founder of the gloomy science, was a Scot, and economists have tended to see in Britain, as the pioneer industrial nation, a logical point of reference, and hence to see industrialisation, expanding markets and economic growth as different aspects of ...”

“... work of an obscure photographer she had discovered in Paris (Atget), Ralph Steiner, Paul Grotz, John Cheever, Ben Shahn and, most important of all, Lincoln Kirstein.Evans always acknowledged the role luck played in his life, and nothing could have been luckier than the friendship he formed with Kirstein, whose influence on his career was so profound that ...”

“... is the closest thing we have to a national industry. King Charles is a private landlord. John Lewis is a private landlord. The homelessness charity St Mungo’s is a private landlord. So are many MPs and, as Ruby found out, doctors.Landlordism has proliferated in tandem with soaring land and property values. A fifth of British homes are currently ...”

“... the sea. Stevenson looked from the top window and saw his characters out there: Billy Bones, Long John Silver and the emerging cast of Kidnapped. The Channel was busy with the ghosts of real seafarers, such as the smuggler Slippery Rogers, who once came to Bournemouth in a boat rowed by forty men, carrying thirty thousand gallons of Dutch brandy. For ...”

“... September, and had made an additional $72 million in 2001 from his stock options.) On 25 July, John Rigas, the former head of Adelphia Communications, was arrested, along with his two sons, on corporate crime charges. They were accused of using the company ‘as the Rigas family’s personal piggy-bank’, spending hundreds of millions of the ...”

“... US and Britain cope with mass death and the destruction of livelihoods. Covid-19 shattered what John Stuart Mill called ‘the deep slumber of a decided opinion’, forcing many to realise that they live in a broken society, with a carefully dismantled state. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung put it in May, unequal and unhealthy societies are ‘a good breeding ...”