“... He was stocky and fit, but somewhat shortsighted, which had disqualified him from active military service. Along with more than a thousand other prisoners he was transported by train to a prisoner-of war camp in Görlitz, about sixty miles east of Dresden. The journey, more than four hundred miles on a slow train in high summer to an unknown destination, must ...”

“... four children, on 6 January 1916, three months before the Easter Rebellion, in which her father, Robert Brennan, served as a commandant in the Irish Volunteers. Following the surrender ordered by Pearse, he was sentenced first to death and then to penal servitude for life but was released soon after and went on to organise the Department of External Affairs ...”

“... dive on 52nd Street but in some bleak provincial drill hall having those famous bunyons vetted for service in the Intelligence Corps. Auden might (and some say should) have condemned himself to five years as a slipshod major, sitting in a dripping Nissen hut in Beaconsfield decoding German intelligence, with occasional trips to the fleshpots to indulge in ...”

“... Victorian theatre and sections of Georgian terrace, facilitating the new transport hub that would service the vital axes, south to the City, east to the Olympic Park. ‘In two houses on Dalston Lane,’ Parry-Davies told us, ‘there were squatters. A couple of guys came to the back door and said, “You’d better get out. Now.” Two days later the houses ...”

“... conflict will disrupt the delivery systems, built on long distances and short order times, that service our needs. The new hesitation about food reflects broader doubts about the last 30 years – the trente glorieuses of the Anglo-Saxon model: our confidence in the energetic binge-and-treadmill culture that propelled us through the 1980s and 1990s has ...”

“... Tiles’s discussions of these details is incisive and perspicuous, and he has done a great service to Dewey by restating Dewey’s side of the argument clearly and sympathetically. I confess, however, that I find those details somewhat tedious, and those debates distractions from what was most original in Dewey’s thought. Unlike Tiles, I regret the ...”

“... were a ‘deadly’ compound of ‘credulity, superstition and fanaticism’. Robert Burton’s visions of religious madness as a satanic pandemic, a commonplace in Tudor and Stuart England, seemed increasingly incomprehensible to those ‘rational’ 18th-century Christians unconvinced of direct divine (let alone diabolic) intervention in ...”

“... book. They even got hold of one of his letters to her, and published it (thus, ironically, doing a service to Hazlitt scholars). It was a total humiliation for Hazlitt, and presumably for Sarah too, who found herself trailed through the press as a ‘pert, cunning, coming, good-for-nothing chit’, and a ‘dowdy trollop’. Hazlitt can, and did, look after ...”

“... that much less probable, as was widely recognised. However, such attempts are still being made. Robert Boyle SJ, in the Quiry, points out the liturgical grandeur of the language at the parting of Bloom and Stephen, as they purge themselves by pissing together in the garden with their eyes on the lighted blind which shows that Molly (the Holy Ghost) is not ...”

“... what they have increasingly come to regard as an embarrassing anachronism. When the manager Robert Newman and the young Henry Wood inaugurated an eight-week season of Promenade Concerts in 1895, they were not doing anything very novel. Such ‘promenades’ had been a permanent yet ephemeral part of London cultural life for the best part of sixty ...”

“... right-wing publications and played a critical role in the purges of China scholars and Foreign Service officers during the McCarthy period. This episode tore apart the field of East Asian studies in America; people wouldn’t speak to each other for years. But China was now ‘Red China’, and the government needed experts. In the late 1950s the Ford ...”

“... the Supreme Court has been gathering momentum for almost twenty years: the nomination battles over Robert Bork in 1987 and Clarence Thomas in 1991 were harbingers. But times have changed since these bitter contests. Bork was a cutting-edge neo-conservative of the 1980s, but his successors may well go far beyond him, striking down laws protecting workers and ...”

“... for the youthful Ackroyd, was ‘a one-horse town’. He was glad to be out of it, in the service of international Modernism. Autobiography could be adjusted later, shifting with the climate of the times. In my copy of Ouch, the poet has made a holograph correction: ‘reaming of things to come’ is revised to ‘dreaming’. Ackroyd’s second book ...”

“... drinking club for young Southern gentlemen. He attributed his own widened social sympathies to his service as a private in the US medical corps in France in 1917-18, though in later life the manners and attachments of his class were what struck younger observers. It had been clear from his schooldays that he wanted to write. What now seems striking is the ...”

“... of hours to astrology. He once cast Philip Larkin’s horoscope, probably an underappreciated service. All of which implies cultural history painted with the broadest of brushes: the villain of the piece is the Renaissance, that catastrophe of individualism, which gave birth at once to the hubris of the scientific mind and the desiccated spirituality of ...”