“... and technical virtuosity ... the almost imperceptibly modern, silver-chiming resonance of “Peter Quince at the Clavier” ’. These aspects of the ‘new’ poetry ‘do much to ameliorate popular displeasure’. Certainly under Marianne Moore’s considering eye all the starkness of the new disappears into her own vision of ‘all this fiddle’, as ...”

“... by Francis Hutcheson. This conclusion emerges from what is presented as a study of Jefferson’s reading and writing joined to a detailed analysis of the 18th-century meanings of key expressions in Jefferson’s draft. In so concluding, Wills sets himself against the scholarly tradition on these matters: Carl Becker, Adrienne Koch and Daniel Boorstin all ...”

“... Schwarzkopf writes, ‘now that they knew of my fascination with their culture’. General Sir Peter de la Billière, Britain’s commander in the Gulf War, seems even more smitten with Arab ‘culture’2. ‘I liked and respected Arabs and understood their way of life,’ he announces. ‘I came to appreciate the Arabs well, to appreciate their fine ...”

“... and ‘stubborn’. Both groups then moved on to an ostensibly different task: reading a somewhat ambiguous story about a young man, whom they were then asked to evaluate. The first group thought much more highly of the young man than the second did, presumably because the positive words they had just memorised were more available to ...”

“... marriage, inheritance and the family. While much of the spadework was done by French scholars, Peter Laslett’s The World we Have Lost (1965) was a penetrating attempt to revise the English picture. Authoritative documentation of this new way of thinking came with Tony Wrigley and Roger Schofield’s The Population History of England (1981), a product of ...”

“... assumptions, shared with my family, that equated cleverness with curiosity, politeness and the reading of books. As my father often said of people who might be envied for their bigger wages or pretensions: ‘Aye, but do they have books in the house?’We had books in the house – a bookcase full of them, and more in a bedroom cupboard. Nobody else in my ...”

“... in the US than at home, and America didn’t live up to the image he’d formed during years of reading Hemingway and Dos Passos. He was disgusted by pressure from anti-Soviet groups to exaggerate his suffering in Russia, and disinclined to become a professional émigré dissident. But in New York his career took off. A kind-hearted Slavicist volunteered to ...”

“... rates and restrictions on currency movements was to deal with a crook called Kourillo, ‘a Peter Lorre character’ who was ‘barely five feet tall’ and had a handshake ‘like an empty glove’. (When Kourillo later betrayed him, Fry took out a murder contract and forced him out of Marseille.) A strange and colourful group assembled in ...”

“... of technology, Dirk Leach, adept at mediating his experience of ‘nihilism’ thanks to a careful reading of Heidegger in his tea breaks: ‘About the empty plenitude that I found surrounding me as I worked . . . Heidegger had much to say.’ Realising that if he stayed too long in the factory it would destroy his ability to write, Leach remarks that ...”

“... tanks and publications. Murdoch’s formal politics weren’t always this way. As a young man reading PPE at Oxford he wrote admiring letters to the Australian Labor prime minister, Ben Chifley. In 1970 the Sun supported Harold Wilson and in 1972 Murdoch’s papers, notably the Australian (a national daily he had founded in 1964), supported Gough ...”

“... to the topic, and SETI was underway. Cocconi and Morrison’s Nature article makes for interesting reading today. It appeared less than two years after Sputnik I had been launched, and combined hard-headed calculation with an almost giddy optimism, the ‘can-do’ and ‘gee-whiz’ spirit that marked the early years of the space age. Why look for signals ...”

“... The World-Telegram ran an eight-part autobiography of the new star. (‘My full name is Joseph Peter Di Maggio Jr,’ it began, and thus, Cramer says, ‘Joe attained his first major league record: youngest player ever to get his own name wrong in his autobiography.’ He was Joseph Paul, son of Giuseppe. The space in ‘Di Maggio’ makes another ...”

“... closed in’, relentlessly working on his scholarly books but rarely listening to music or reading outside his field of study, with little interest in society, let alone the high society into which Steiner and others suppose him to have climbed. Blunt himself attributed his survival to alcohol and hard work, and there is much evidence of this. Thus, on ...”

“... that his job was being lined up for one of New Labour’s rising stars such as Jack Straw or Peter Mandelson, Cook may indeed have been thinking hard about escape routes to the European Commission or the Scottish Parliament, but that doesn’t mean he was already a busted flush. He did, after all, survive another five years – and when he finally left ...”

“... also included the artists Nigel Henderson, William Turnbull and Magda Cordell, the architects Peter and Alison Smithson, and the critic Reyner Banham. In the late 1980s the Smithsons looked back on the ‘as found’ aesthetic of New Brutalism as ‘a confronting recognition of what the postwar world actually was like’: ‘In a society that had nothing ...”