“... was guilt around fomenting political violence as a playwright. The play in question was Cathleen Ni Houlihan, written with Lady Gregory and first performed in Dublin in April 1902, with Maud Gonne playing Cathleen. In an interview with the United Irishman, Yeats said that the subject was ‘Ireland and its struggle for independence’. The theatre was packed ...”

“... or bag to check you have the necessary equipment for the journey? Or take a final check in the hall mirror, ‘to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet’? You don’t have a slave to guard your door, as the ancients did, so you set the alarm (or you set the dog, cave canem). Keys? Yes, they’re in your hand. You have ‘the power of the ...”

“... all too easy. Both the 17-year-old Elio and his older lover, Oliver, are flawless, but with no anguish to their affection. Nor is there any lack of understanding from the boy’s parents, his father particularly, with this being singled out as evidence of the film’s maturity. It’s quite chaste, very beautiful and it slips down so easily one is left ...”

“... greatness to steam power and machinery and at the peak of this activity a million men, no fewer than one in ten of the male workforce, were employed in the mines. Then, the coalfields had been the scene of this country’s only epic class-confrontation – the General Strike of 1926, a seven-month Calvary for the miners, a nine-day wonder ...”

“... to serve her husband in the British Antarctic Survey: they were expected to drink beer in the hall, while the officer class took cocktails in the drawing-room. The men preferred beer, we were told, and, given the choice, they might well have chosen ‘cloudy’, the connoisseur’s drop, before the filtered blandness of the more expensive ...”

“... relations may help explain why the original version of Freaks was heavily cut and edited and no longer exists; why the film, even in its edited state, was banned in Britain for thirty years; and why American audiences flocked to see it in some places (Boston, Cleveland, Houston, St Paul, Omaha) but not in others (Los Angeles, Chicago, New York). It also ...”

“... have a memory of sitting there and feeling smug,’ she wrote of attending a class taught by John Crowe Ransom in 1938. She identified as a Trotskyite, placing herself on the anti-Stalinist left along with the writers she admired: Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy.Hardwick wanted to flee to New York, like ‘a provincial in Balzac, yearning ...”

“... maybe, or Oakland, or the astral plane. They were the place she went to leave her body and feel no pain, and there is no real need for us to be there. She would go on telling anyway. Berlin’s gifts are not ones you have ever tried or been told to cultivate. The details she chooses are those you have purposely ...”

“... When​ T.S. Eliot asked John Hayward in February 1938 to act as his literary executor (‘in case some unexpected calamity cuts me down like a flower’), he told him to prevent publication of his literary remains – including ‘any letters at all of any intimacy to anybody’. ‘In fact,’ he added, ‘I have a mania for posthumous privacy ...”

“... books under review belong to very different genres, both of which are relevant to this task – John Willett’s a critical and historical study based on many years as reviewer, English editor and translator of Brecht, Ronald Hayman’s a lively, detailed biography – though the first turns out to be far the more expert, original and ...”

“... blighted childhood, felt she had found it at Santarém: That golden evening I really wanted to go no farther; more than anything else I wanted to stay awhile in that conflux of two great rivers ... The street was deep in dark-gold river sand ... The zebus’ hooves, the people’s feet waded in golden sand, dampered by golden sand. Nothing here is ...”

“... the village, who beat me up for my intolerable conceit. But the capacity to read brought with it no corresponding advance in intellectual curiosity. I rested lazily on my laurels, taking as long as anyone else of my age to venture beyond the conventional diet of Beatrix Potter, Winnie the Pooh, The Wind in the Willows and the Famous Five. By the early ...”

“... nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversation?’Once upon a time there was …        ‘A King!’ my little readers will say at once.        ...”

“... track of the coverage. ‘At the start of the strike,’ he told me, ‘we stressed to the men, on no account would any of them commit violence or damage. We’d witnessed some of the miners commit damage. The newspapers ran amok on them. We didn’t want the newspapers being able to run amok on us.’He failed to heed his own advice. After Albertina and the ...”

“... and angles broken off for the sake of correspondence’. Neiman understands, of course, that ‘no two histories are ever entirely alike.’ The question is whether we can, without doing violence to the past or the present, usefully take lessons from the German experience. Do analogies between the two countries work? In one sense they do: it is possible to ...”