“... guess who takes the lion’s share? ‘Let me stand on the rooftop of my reckoning,’ says Lewis ‘Teabag’ Miner, the narrator of Lipsyte’s second novel, Home Land (2004), ‘and shout naught but the indisputable: I did not pan out.’ The book is framed as a series of unpublished letters to Teabag’s high school alumni newsletter, chronicling ...”

“... pulled in writers such as Woolf, Lawrence, Yeats, Aldous Huxley, E.M. Forster and Wyndham Lewis, but also gave Proust, Valéry, Cocteau and other European writers their first airing in English. Conservative reaction, like socialist internationalism, was distinctly un-English in its lack of provincialism. If the journal espoused an unpleasant brand of ...”

“... changed his name from Elisha by deed poll. Cranborne, meanwhile, was dealing with entreaties from Lewis Namier that German Jews be let into Britain. Cranborne thought him ‘a most tiresome person . . . he is not to be trusted. We cannot say enough to Jews of this type that people do not become refugees until they leave.’ Lyttelton, on the other hand, was ...”

“... of Braudel’s other book, the celebrated Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.1 In both works, the chronological account of what happened is left until last, coming almost as an anti-climax after a prolonged analysis of the parameters, preconditions and pressures which (according to Braudel) determined that particular ...”

“... then slated for 2020. When he was pressed not to vote for Corbyn as leader in 2015, Clive Lewis replied: ‘It’ll be about democratising the party, handing power back to the membership and opposing austerity: why wouldn’t I back it?’ Once these goals were achieved, many expected Corbyn would sub in a more conventional politician, firmly of the ...”

“... chances are that it was The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I cringed for my former self when I saw Philip Kaufman’s 1988 adaptation again. Everything about it was wrong, from the opening shots of crumbling plaster and dim lightbulbs in the stairwell of a Prague tenement (three of Kundera’s bugbears in The Art of the Novel are verisimilitude, realistic ...”

“... it quickly came to be known. But the Cold War changed everything, and at a public enquiry in 1948 Lewis Silkin, Minister of Town and Country Planning, announced that the Government had no choice but to declare the evacuation permanent. Mr Ralph Bond, who had formed and commanded the Tyneham Home Guard among his own villagers in 1940, was bought out. Those of ...”

“... Smith told Campbell that he did (‘When I see one of those Free Church ministers on the street in Lewis I feel like walking across the road and hitting him in the face ... It’s power they want, that’s all it is’), or any injustice of the last century in England being as alive as the Highland clearances are. Our world has been flattened and evenedout by ...”

“... for Scientology’s recruitment of Hollywood celebrities – Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Juliette Lewis, Kirstie Alley, Peaches Geldof – who serve as evidence that the religion makes the ‘able more able’. Even William Burroughs, during his brief stint in the church, was featured in Freedom bragging that he’d become a more imaginative writer and ...”

“... in their enthusiastic disgust over his bad taste. It is unusual, for instance, to find Wyndham Lewis (for whom Murry was merely a ‘crafty gushbag’) so overtaken in the matter of invective. Virginia Woolf, who saw in him a posturing little man with bad teeth and a profoundly perverted nature, wrote: ‘he has been rolling in dung, and smells ...”

“... ruthlessness, sentimentality and greed. David Selznick came of age in that world. His father, Lewis Selznick, was an early, unsuccessful mogul. In a line not quoted here, he allegedly told his sons: ‘Live expensively! Throw it around! Give it away! Always remember to live beyond your means. It gives a man confidence.’ But if father was a joker, he was ...”

“... key debates can be carried on almost unseen in long afternotes. Even such an authoritative work as Philip Williams’s Gaitskell, with its unrivalled picture of postwar Labour politics, wholly omits Gaitskell’s colourful sex life. ‘I decided at the outset I wasn’t going into all that,’ he told me. American biography, as Robert Caro’s vast Life of LBJ ...”

“... into a paranoid ‘zeal for order’ of his own (I mean this as a compliment, according to the Philip K. Dick definition of the paranoiac as ‘the person with all the facts’ on whom the maintenance of meaning in the world seems to depend). At the same time his short history of outmoded techniques also points to a counter-argument to his vision of total ...”

“... obstacle to the historical understanding of Burke has been the extraordinary detestation which Sir Lewis Namier conceived for him and all his works, and which was transmitted to Namier’s authoritatively placed disciples. He is right to combat this, because it took the form of persistent denigration of Burke’s character and motives; unfortunately, he has ...”

“... interconnected.The new direction taken by Welsh campaigners was signalled in 1962 when Saunders Lewis, a founding member of Plaid Cymru, made a speech arguing that defending the Welsh language and Welsh culture, rather than self-government, should be the primary goal of nationalists, and that direct action should be the strategy. Welsh was in real danger of ...”