“... lure to biographers – judging by his bibliography, Shepherd’s is the tenth so far, which may be a record for a living politician. (Powell himself dismisses all notion of writing his memoirs – ‘like a dog returning to its own vomit’.) Shepherd has included a large proportion of the better known Powell stories, though he omits two of my ...”

“... affected their moral behaviour – particularly in its Fabian advocacy of free love. Other seeds may also have been planted by the work, in Britain and in Europe. Michael Foot is in sympathy with Patrick Parrinder’s reading of this crucial phase of Wells’s intellectual evolution. Their discourses, however, are markedly different. Foot’s style is ...”

“... the Beatles, they are post-Marxist in the sense that the Internet comes after the Somme. Hall may dislike trendy theories, but this is a bit like Jeffrey Bernard campaigning against drinking clubs. Whatever his reservations, he does stand for all the Right Things in the arena of cultural studies: impeccably ...”

“... of rum-drinking in between. (Daniel notes that in choosing the rumba the Ministry of Culture may also have been influenced by the fact that, unlike conga and casino, which are danced by everyone, rumba is performed by only one couple or one person, while everyone else watches. This makes it easier to control.) So whereas rumba had once been done by ...”

“... of Revolution and of Poetry’, it prays that ‘man’s long journey through the night / May not have been in vain.’ When Gascoyne said he belonged to Europe rather than England, you can see what he had in mind, but too much of the poetry as a result seems to occupy an uneasy linguistic no man’s land, somewhere between Paris and home in ...”

“... Buchanan rides to rescue the most innocent children of all – the unborn. His opponent, Bob Dole, may have lost the use of an arm in the Second World War, but the New York Times explains that Dole ‘would be the oldest candidate ever elected to a first term as President and so cannot plausibly claim the vaunted mantle of outsider riding to the rescue’. A ...”

“... imparted a significance to ideas of identity and destiny, and a faith which, whatever else it may have been, was undeniably creative. It would be – indeed has been – convenient to dismiss Speer’s talents and to regard Schmid-Ehmen’s eagles as kitsch. Later in the exhibition we are able to see what Mukhina might have created in the streamlined ...”

“... Merle Haggard’s 1969 song ‘Okie from Muskogee’. During the Nixon era the political dialogue may have been between plain folks content to play football and drink white lightning and ‘those hippies in San Francisco’, growing their hair long, smoking dope and burning their draft cards. But in the Thirties the American flag was not something liberals ...”

“... the Venona NKVD traffic don’t look so hot from the defence point of view. Devotees of the case may want to fault Tanenhaus for repeating what earlier witnesses told Allen Weinstein for his book, Perjury, and for taking the Hungarian papers at their face value, while excluding some second thoughts in both cases. There is no reason this argument should not ...”

“... identity and needs. At last we Scots have had an opportunity to redress our grievances. On 6 May 1999 we cast our votes for the first Scottish Parliament since the Union of 1707. And almost 42 per cent of the electorate stayed at home. It did rain, I suppose. Since the devolution referendum of 1997, media attention has largely focused on the threat posed ...”

“... book owes more to his admiration for the novels of Fenimore Cooper than to any field trips he may have taken into the French countryside. Sand knew the country at first hand, having spent a lot of her childhood and regular periods of her adult life in the quite grand house in Nohant that had been her grandmother’s. She admits in L’Histoire de ma vie ...”

“... This period, which culminated in the ‘revolutionary game’ played out during the events of May 1968, began in earnest with the ‘scandale de Strasbourg’ in 1966, when students inspired by the Situationists took control of the students’ union. Their demands were simple: ‘abolish everything’ and ‘destroy the university’. On the orders of the ...”

“... in the crimes of the Queen just as people now believe/disbelieve in aliens. They think there may be something in it, though they know the stories don’t bear looking at too closely; anyway, believing in aliens is more fun than not, and at the root of the whole problem is a restless intimation that ‘they’ are keeping something from us, that in dark ...”

“... initiated a correspondence with Zukofsky and two years later went to New York to meet him. It may have been her first time any distance from home. Here is George Oppen’s wife, Mary, on meeting Niedecker in New York in 1934: We invited her to dinner, and after waiting for her until long after dinner time, we ate and were ready for bed when a timid knock ...”

“... of the drive.I remember thinking: alive or dead, a rat wasa god-forsaken thing,But at least, in May, that even a rat should be alive.Sydney, however, could not cajole her. It was not the moment for a nice luncheon, or a Charlie Chaplin film, or even Mudie’s. With a timetable even more strict than usual, he had to catch the 4.30 to Dorchester, where ...”