“... already ireful coloured persons gets to hear the ITV soundtrack on which the following exchange took place. Commentator: ‘The Cameroon goalkeeper learned his trade from the great German, Sepp Meier, and that is why he wears those black track-suit trousers. Meier gave them to him.’ Expert (chuckling): ‘I didn’t realise he was wearing track-suit ...”

“... any other audience’. Thus it defied Reith’s doctrine of a BBC-unified culture, and Sir John was heard to protest. For less exalted reasons, it also irritated most of the press. But for a time it survived the traumas of its birth, and under George Barnes and Harman Grisewood there was a reasonably permissive, though it would now also be called an ...”

“... extraordinary ceiling mural depicting cavorting monkeys in 18th-century dress, executed c.1914 by John Alden Twachtman, who took inspiration from similar murals painted c.1730 by Christophe Huet at the Château de Chantilly, can now be admired. Elsewhere, architectural features – ranging from decorative marble and ...”

“... with them of fifteen billion dollars because of the distorted price structure.’ Gaidar’s line took two years to work its way through the system and remains an area of contention even now. For the moment Gaidar himself has retired, leaving the field to men who do not wish to treat the other Republics as sovereign states, and who are actively attempting to ...”

“... for Point Counter Point. He lacked Waugh’s genuine passion for snobbery and religion, and took time to develop his own disagreeable substitute for humour, exemplified by the moment in Brighton Rock when the nice girl Ida, foolish enough to enjoy the simple sentimentalities of life, weeps in the crematorium as ‘Fred became part of the smoke nuisance ...”

“... de Musset was so brief, or the nasty circumstances in which she eventually broke with Chopin (who took her problem daughter’s side against her mother): in retrospect, she’s prepared to be harsh towards herself alone. The outrageous Baudelaire laid the blame for her doveishness on the Devil, ‘who has persuaded her to trust herself to her kind heart and ...”

“... that was it.’ Understandably, given Koestler’s eminence and the attitudes of the time, Craigie took no action on the assault, and did not even tell her husband; in fact, she was to keep the secret for half a century. Craigie believed Koestler’s behaviour was of a pattern, and Cesarani agrees: ‘Koestler had beaten and raped women before; over the next ...”

“... happen’), and as a human being who must live like a man of this world under the moral law. Auden took a Freudian view of Dante, as a poet who craved for his poetry to bring him ‘honour, power, riches and the love of women’. It might have been worth Steve Ellis’s while to mention Auden as a case of the on the whole silent majority of English poets who ...”

“... see what a hand you write’ in the later version. ‘O how I was sham’d! – He, in my Fright, took it,’ Pamela recalls. Her exclamation was first ‘corrected’ to ‘O how ashamed I was!’ and then removed completely. Yet, in its clumsiness and incorrectness, it more accurately conveys Pamela’s sense that she has done nothing wrong, though she is ...”

“... L’Insurgé is dedicated ‘To the dead of 1871. To all those victims of social injustice who took up arms against a crooked world and formed the great federation of sorrow beneath the flag of the Commune.’ This third volume in fact serves as a memorial to the ultimate and most terrible of the defeats Vallès had met with in his life, when the Paris ...”

“... and they were ordered to get out of their vehicle. Soldiers were already shooting. The two of them took immediate cover behind a cement wall. The father waved to show they were there and was shot in the hand. A little later Muhammad was shot in the foot. The father now shielded his son with his own body. More bullets hit both, and the boy was killed. Doctors ...”

“... a guarantee of $29 billion against the bank’s mortgage liabilities – basically, the government took on the risk of the dodgy mortgages, in order to make the rest of the bank viable for purchase. They did so because they were worried about the risk to the rest of the banking system if Bear Stearns collapsed and a ‘chaotic unwinding’ of the financial ...”

“... little to say to his rare visitors and he gave no interviews of substance. As US-China relations took a new turn following Nixon’s decision to enlist Beijing’s services in the Cold War, Chiang became an irrelevance. A number of important books have been written about Nationalist China since the 1970s – among them Lloyd Eastman’s The Nationalist Era ...”

“... generally agree that several dozen Jews were killed. Because Davies is writing about an event that took place in 1944, he doesn’t need to give much attention to Polish-Jewish relations. By that point the Warsaw Ghetto had been razed, and its more than 500,000 residents killed, some of them in the death camps, others in the fighting. At most, several thousand ...”

“... Peter and I began to meet at Bertorelli’s for wine, talk, food and more wine. At my suggestion, John Tagg the critic and historian of photography joined our meetings. The three of us agreed – a pretty cynical move – to ask Cork, the new editor of Studio International whom Peter knew as a Cambridge connection, to make up this Gang of Four. The idea was ...”