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“... the claws were bared less often. These extracts, chosen by Benson’s splendid biographer, David Newsome, from among the four million words of the diaries Benson left as his memorial, are taken from a period in Benson’s life when he was uncertain and hypersensitive, so the claws are out. It was at the turn of the century, and Benson, having been ...”

“... of many a lesser figure. In what might be called the peripheral stakes Dylan Thomas and even David Jones have had more attention in some quarters – in the case of Dylan Thomas, with a wild publicity which has had little enough to do with his work. MacDiarmid, it is true, has had a share of irrelevant – and sometimes damaging – publicity, mainly ...”

“... To understand Nicole Kidman, David Thomson argues, you need to see a film called In the Cut. Not because Kidman is in it. She isn’t. The film stars Meg Ryan, is directed by Jane Campion and tells the story of how a lonely creative writing teacher, Fran, becomes involved with a cop (Mark Ruffalo) who is investigating a string of particularly gruesome murders ...”

“... intensity in such media ‘events’ as the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, and the David Duke campaign. Conspiracy theories detailed the infiltration of American higher education by ‘politically correct’ militants, and lamented the takeover of the art world by feminists, homosexuals and ethnic minorities. In short, for Americans who watch ...”

“... one, which was edited for the Oxford University Press by C.H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson and simply titled Ben Jonson. It was a landmark in the emergence of modern editorial standards. The publication of its 11 volumes began in 1925 and ended in 1952, fifty years after the signature of the publisher’s contract. Perhaps ‘works’ would ...”

“... German invasion and thereby gather useful information, but in the event not much was achieved. As David Abulafia put it, if ‘he was something more than a professor of Byzantine studies … it would be absurd to cast him in the role of James Bond.’ In truth the war was enormously useful to him, allowing him to pursue his research. Afterwards he went to run ...”

“... only of divorce but also of deference and authority. Social historians neglect it at their peril. David Kynaston in Family Britain 1951-57 gives a pretty full account, but in Peter Hennessy’s Having It So Good: Britain in the 1950s the only Peter Townsend in the index is the sociologist of that name. Even Brown does not quite do justice to the ...”

“... but who are strongly opposed to the excesses of feminism, affirmative action for blacks, and O.J. Simpson-type legalism in dealing with crime. Because these less affluent ‘new Republicans’ come straight from the traditional base of the Democratic Party, what is happening among the Republicans is also destabilising the Democratic Party. The connection with ...”

“... year Balzac wrote Cousin Pons, Verdi wrote Macbeth, Berlioz composed The Damnation of Faust, James Simpson first successfully used chloroform, the German Gustav Kirchhoff spelled out the laws of electric currents in a network of wires and Carl Zeiss opened an optics factory in Jena, Switzerland. It was the year Alfred Krupp cast his first steel gun and an ...”

“... version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, D.W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation, The Jazz Singer, and David O. Selznick’s 1939 super-production Gone with the Wind ‘provide the scaffolding for American film history’ – although it takes us no further than the eve of the Second World War. This reading of Hollywood is anticipated by Leslie Fiedler’s ...”

“... murder trial, one of the sensations of its day, as compelling and divisive as the O.J. Simpson trial, had by this time dwindled to this obscure collection of legal arguments and witness depositions, mostly written in cramped law-Latin ‘interfilleted with Italian streaks’, incomprehensible to most and of interest to none. Obscure, unreadable, it ...”

“... his younger brother Hamo at Gallipoli and his beloved ‘poor Tommy’, his fellow Welch Fusilier David Thomas – nourished his Homeric rage, which, in a uniquely Sassoonian way, led him to take the whole burden of war on himself as a kind of cosmic personal insult:I want to smash someone’s skull; I want to have a scrap and get out of the war for a bit or ...”

“... of the Nahlin, for instance, in 1936 when Duff Cooper and his wife accompanied the King and Mrs Simpson around the Mediterranean. Years ago Russell Harty had supper with Diana Cooper and she told him that she and her husband had had the adjoining cabin to the royal couple (or rather one royal, the other not) and that she had had her ear pressed to the wall ...”

“... landowner. Her father was Henry, Lord Morley, the scholarly translator of Petrarch and Plutarch. David Starkey begins an essay on Lord Morley by wondering whether we should class him like Prufrock as an ‘attendant lord’: ‘one that will do/To swell a progress, start a scene or two,/Advise the prince.’ Lord Morley never did become a royal ...”

“... who from the first were eye-witnesses and servants of the Word.’ Memory was the issue for Mr Simpson. A former maths teacher at the school, he now suffers from Parkinson’s disease and he said he found it difficult to settle and remember things. Mr Simpson sat in a high-backed chair wearing purple pyjamas. His ...”