“... Frieda arrived in Turin, in 1919, they stayed a night at the house of an industrialist called Sir Walter Becker. This was Lawrence’s judgment, in a letter: The old knight and I had a sincere half-mocking argument, he for security and bank-balance and power, I for naked liberty. In the end, he rested safe on his bank-balance, I in my nakedness. We hated ...”

“... resisting the rise of a common feeling of Indian nationhood, on suppressing the growth of a demos. Herbert Risley, the architect of the partition of Bengal, admitted frankly, though not publicly, that ‘one of our main objects is to split up and thereby weaken a solid body of opponents to our rule.’ The British looked kindly on the formation of the ...”

“... his understanding of Marxism. By the 1970s he is writing in New Society about Victor Serge and Walter Benjamin, independent Marxists who were opposed to the Party line or idiosyncratic in their interpretation of Marxist theory. Serge was a former anarchist who was soon expelled from the Party and ended up as a ‘left oppositionist’, disenchanted with ...”

“... beers’ at a bar, in a conversation between Robert Swanson, a 29-year-old venture capitalist, and Herbert Boyer, a biochemist at the University of California, San Francisco. Working with the Stanford geneticist Stanley Cohen, Boyer had helped to develop some elegant recombinant DNA technologies which immediately suggested enormous value to the pharmaceutical ...”

“... birth to a son, David. She studies for masters’ degrees in literature and philosophy at Harvard. Herbert Marcuse boards in their house. The tone is one of new maturity in a high-toned world, but there are also floods of tears, feelings of imprisonment, the need to die or leave. There isn’t much room for the complex, human Philip Rieff. He was famous in his ...”

“... billed as ‘the laugh sensation of two continents’ at the Coconut Grove in Miami: the columnist Walter Winchell called it ‘vulgar’ and Bert Lahr, who played Estragon, got a letter asking what a star of The Wizard of Oz was doing ‘in a play which is communistic, atheistic and existential’. ‘This Miami fiasco does not distress me in the smallest ...”

“... copy ‘in the British Museum’, to remind his brother of the ‘Genealogy of the Eliot Family by Walter Graeme Eliot of New York’ – a Who’s Who of Eliots of which their father had possessed ‘two copies’. He then expounded on various Eliots, reminding Henry that ‘Our people, you remember, went to [East] Coker, near Yeovil in Somerset.’ This ...”

“... Dog Years (1963). This is the story (among a great many other things) of the friendship between Walter Matern, the son of a German miller from the Danzig hinterland, and the half-Jewish Eddi Amsel, alias Haseloff, alias Brauxell (in several different spellings). The account of three decades – from 1925 to the mid-Fifties – is presented by various ...”

“... then ministers had ignored any recommendations they didn’t like.The new inquiry was led by Sir Herbert Samuel, a Liberal politician. He proposed the nationalisation of coal royalties (unearned payments to the owners of the land on which collieries stood) and government leadership on the reorganisation of the industry – closing uneconomic ...”

“... across South African campuses in 2015, Mbembe said that he often returned to a 1969 debate between Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno to reflect on the way intellectuals might ‘bear witness to the main events of [our] time’. As public discontent with post-apartheid South Africa spilled over from the townships into the universities, some faculty were ...”

“... Progress all the way to the semi-finals in 1998 vindicated the new Croatia’s existence. From ‘Herbert Zimmermann’s West German commentary at the end of the 1954 World Cup final to Papa Bouba Diop’s dance after scoring for Senegal against France in 2002, from Pelé’s volley in 1958 to al-Owairan’s remarkable goal against Belgium in 1994, from ...”

“... a stepmother out of a fairy story: pious, chapel-going and a hypocrite who beat the youngest boys, Walter and George, and then told lies about them to her new husband so that when he came home from work he gave them the strap all over again. The two elder boys were old enough to escape the house and too big to beat, so Dad and his brother George (‘our ...”

“... brave cowboys who inhabited them. The poem was published in English in a great translation by Walter Owen in 1935: And on the spot like two mad bulls Into each other we tore; The man was quick, but a bit too rash, And a backhand slash soon settled his hash, And I left him grunting and thrashing about, With his tripes all over the floor. ‘The figure of ...”