“... replaced; trusted and trusting helpers and administrators were dumped after years of devoted service. Surviving the siren call of Aldeburgh required a special kind of mental discipline. When Heather Harper first went to sing for Britten she was warned: ‘When you go down there, you do your work, and then get away. Don’t try to get involved too ...”

“... product made in Germany.’ There we see the spirit of caricature at work, although in the service of making the ‘incomprehensible islanders’ understandable, so that they may be brought into a projected European Union. Leavis’s relative neglect of European letters (though he read in them) may be less significant than his attitude toward the ...”

“... for their continued authority of speech we must come closer to our own time – to the poetry of Robert Lowell or of Sylvia Plath. There the language of poetry has the same kind of mesmeric power and the same air of constant danger. But it is, of course, danger of a different kind – the danger that boils up from within and makes living for a poet a hazard ...”

“... US Mint in Philadelphia, beginning on a salary of $5 a day that rose, in nearly thirty years’ service, to only $2500 a year, really did somehow challenge and defeat the crooked umpire (whom the young Pound goes on to suggest might have been bribed), this was very much the exception rather than the rule. Pound’s casually bullying letters to his father ...”

“... the autumn of 2018, Merkel was forced to sack Hans-Georg Maaßen as head of the internal security service (Verfassungsschutz) after he tried to discredit disturbing video evidence of racist violence in the East German town of Chemnitz. Supporters of the AfD have two common denominators: hostility to mass immigration and hostility to Merkel. This is true in ...”

“... Gloucestershire. Her father and mother both worked at the local woollen mill and Ann was sent into service aged fifteen, working for a butcher’s family. Wright wonders whether the animal cadavers helped give her a basic understanding of anatomy. Aged sixteen, she left the job to marry a tailor called Henry Sommers. He turned out to be an alcoholic, and to ...”

“... the work may once have been intended as an aid to the consolidation of the dynasty into whose service he had entered. Here was one kind of political activity, besides the day-to-day work of a City legal official and member of the King’s Council. Within a couple of years he was to be plunged into another – religious controversy. Politics and ...”

“... it operates a strange amalgam of common law and Continental practice, and just as in 1946 Robert Jackson, who led the US legal team, was incapable of transcending his belief that the American system alone guarantees a fair trial, so in The Hague the American lawyers seem strangely unable to adapt to those elements of Continental practice which have ...”

“... idea of French liberty to smuggle himself onto a neighbouring island and try to enlist for active service. This first attempt ended in humiliating repatriation, but a year later he was on a boat full of fellow soldiers bound for Casablanca and then France. By the end of 1944, he was serving with the Sixth Regiment of Tirailleurs sénégalais, pursuing the ...”

“... In Praised Be Our Lords, he quotes a letter he wrote from jail in 1969 to Philippe de Saint-Robert, a Gaullist of the left and the author of Le Jeu de la France, which he had just been reading. The letter was signed off by ‘an ordinary young Frenchman who, because he loves his country and its people, went to Bolivia. Everyone plays … in his own ...”

“... depression at Oxford; job in publishing, deadpan early novels, marriage into the Pakenhams; war service in Northern Ireland and Allied Liaison; postwar triumph with A Dance to the Music of Time? The most striking revelations come where he said least, of his childhood and his loves. The finest thing in Spurling’s book is her delicate portrait of the ...”

“... radio communications on the night were a complete disaster, owing to cuts in funding for the fire service. Many people believe, and there is some evidence for it, that the positioning of the new academy school knocked out too much space for fire vehicles to park. In any event, the fire was out of control within minutes and there was no extinguishing ...”

“... Merchants and Revolution, dedicated to Stone, comprehensively overturns that judgment. Its author, Robert Brenner, belongs to that rare group of historians who have given their name to a whole literature – the ‘Brenner Debate’ on the origins of agrarian capitalism in Europe recalling the ‘Pirenne Thesis’ of old. His new book, in which the name of ...”

“... the first. The South Bank Show was also reviewed in the Spectator by Richard Ingrams, as follows:[Robert] Redford was followed onto the show by young Martin Amis, a rather scruffy looking man without a tie. I was baffled as to why his new novel should be given about half an hour of publicity when there are so many other things worthy of attention ... Amis ...”

“... though it was, was to help foster this American consensus. He admired Commentary’s film critic, Robert Warshow, for once saying, ‘A man watches a movie and the critic must acknowledge that he is that man’ – ordinary in his reaction however exceptional his talents for analysis. Podhoretz is in effect saying, without at first becoming an absolutist ...”