“... upon his predecessors, in fact, that Fitzgerald fans who have only recently read the Le Vot book may find passages in Invented Lives bringing on attacks of déjà vu. Why, then, is Mellow offering this third Fitzgerald biography in five years? His answer: Invented Lives isn’t just another biography. It has a thesis. What thesis? That Scott and Zelda ...”

“... of what would follow victory, whether from his ‘hostilities only’ Labour colleagues Attlee and Ernest Bevin when they tried to discuss postwar domestic reconstruction, or from the Tories Anthony Eden and Duff Cooper, who told him that after the war Britain would find the leadership of Europe there for the taking. Over five years, Churchill’s abilities as ...”

“... to be cured and would sue if they were not. The argument rang true. One has only to recall Ernest Shepard’s drawing for All sorts and conditions    Of famous physicians Came hurrying round    At a run to be reminded that tailcoats, boiled fronts, half-glasses and gravitas were, until not long ago, far more useful than what was in the ...”

“... when it comes to personal matters, Hinton makes a distinction between male and female respondents. Ernest van Someren, Quaker and chemist, fretted about how to reconcile his pacifism with his firm’s production of war materials but wrote little about his marriage or personal life, and while the young soldier Denis Argent was preoccupied by personal ...”

“... Christ tells Mary Magdalene to spread the news to the other disciples. On this scriptural basis, Ernest Renan asked in La Vie de Jésus (1863), an account that caused outrage in its day: ‘Did enthusiasm, always credulous, create afterwards the group of narratives by which it was sought to establish faith in the resurrection? … Let us say, however, that ...”

“... its own as far as hard words were concerned. She had suddenly run away with handsome, forbidding Ernest Gébler, the son of a Czech expatriate, a masterful, touchy man who gave her a hard time in his own more exotic vein, the hard time administered by husbands and rivals. Two sons were born. The couple came apart. It must have been galling to witness the ...”

“... who know nothing of swords, ploughs or books. But the process of change, however improbable it may have been, cannot be put into reverse. So what will happen next? To what uses will the enormous productive capacity of industrial societies be put? What novel modes of thought and behaviour will the next advances in knowledge and technique bring in their ...”

“... which exclude the mots of the compiler himself. The tendency to line oneself up with the masters may be studied in Bartlett’s Unfamiliar Quotations, compiled by Leonard Louis Levenson, which contains more than a hundred and eighty entries credited to L.L.L.; in A Treasury of Humorous Quotations, compiled by Herbert V. Prochnow and Herbert V. Prochnow ...”

“... Freud a man of ‘absolute honesty’ and ‘flawless integrity’, as his loyal biographer Ernest Jones called him. How many times were we told that? It was his passion for truth that enabled him to confront the demons of his own unconscious and to lift the multisecular repression that weighed on sexuality, despite the ‘resistance’ of his patients ...”

“... other hand, Paul Hyams hailed it as a blast of fresh air and the sort of book we need more of, and Ernest Gellner was equally enthusiastic about its intellectual daring. I thought it was a splendid piece of work: a small book with large implications. Moreover, in its main claims it was clearly right, and none of its critics have in the least disturbed its ...”

“... The Welsh psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, known for his three-volume hagiography of Freud, was also the author of a book on figure skating. The New York Psychoanalytic Institute owns a dusty copy, which is illustrated with drawings of the elegant squiggles skaters were supposed to leave on the ice: ‘Only in a certain type of dream,’ Jones wrote, offering a clue to his other area of expertise, ‘do we ever else attain a higher degree of the same ravishing experience of exultantly skiing the earth ...”

“... dangerous forces of working-class unrest and political protest were deeply unsettling. Today we may relate that unrest to the increased share of the new prosperity of a modernising and developing society which had been mopped up by the better-off, and may relate this prosperity to the new, British dimension. Given the ...”

“... Maxwell Fyfe’s speech came in the triumphal wake of the Congress of Europe, held in The Hague in May 1948 with Churchill as its honorary chairman and 750 delegates from 17 European countries. Although the congress possessed no governmental authority, its cultural committee drew up a charter of fundamental rights to be enforced by a continental supranational ...”

“... of watching him and Grant face off, aided and abetted by Hitchcock’s camera and timing, and Ernest Lehman’s wonderful script. There is a remarkable scene in the film where the characters and the script actually confess their interest in all these theatrical displays – their own commitment, so to speak, to Hitchcock’s movie and to our ...”

“... of imperialism, this approach becomes awkward in an age (if, of course, we have got there) which may wish to read about ‘them’ in terms other than those of Eurocentric romance. There are signs, however, that this may be changing, if the case of Mau Mau, Kenya’s anti-colonial rebellion of the Fifties, is anything to ...”