“... most admired, whom he had learnt from, before whom he ‘felt humble’. Leavis, Priestley said, ‘did mischief to the art he was boarded and lodged to serve’ – rather a revealing comment. ‘To be an author was to invite damnation’ at the hands of his critical Calvinism. The two had in common a secret dissatisfaction: Priestley with the writers ...”

“... his heart ... For a while he thought that she understood ... ‘But death is nothing,’ she said ... he was struck dumb: he had forgotten that he spoke to an alien intelligence, that would not suffer the rebellious creed that was his. It is as though Sassoon is unable to acknowledge his own rebellion. Perhaps this should not surprise us. For the ...”

“... one for a British, the other for an American magazine. Through Pound, Frost also met Yeats, who is said to have praised his new work (‘the best poetry written in America for a long time’). Frost soon became friendly with the Georgian poets, Lascelles Abercrombie, W.H. Davies and Wilfrid Gibson, and he formed a truly close friendship, probably the closest ...”

“... place. It was at the Gare du Nord in Paris, just after Easter 1895, that Ada, his cousin’s wife, said to him: ‘You are just the person to write. Why don’t you?’ Later in the year they became lovers, though a decade was to pass before she obtained a divorce and they could marry: it is not clear whether Galsworthy could not bear to break his father’s ...”

“... may be legally poured out, dissected and analysed, with effects on the owner to be determined. Edward Snowden made these discoveries, among others, while working as an analyst for the CIA, the NSA and the security outfit Booz Allen Hamilton (whose present vice chairman, Mike McConnell, is a former director of the NSA). Imperialism has been defined as doing ...”

“... have been asked to confront challenges as serious as the ones we face right now,’ Obama said, truly, after will.i.am and Sheryl Crow had busked their way through Bob Marley’s ‘One Love’, with Herbie Hancock noodling on piano; and the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington DC had pounded out ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee’; and Garth Brooks had ...”

“... Ethiopians, subject to an international arms embargo, had camels and little else: they were, Steer said, still living in the ‘spear age’. (His spirited book about the invasion, Caesar in Abyssinia, was written as a testament to ‘the strength and spirit of the Ethiopian armies against a European great power’.) The war which finally began in October 1935 ...”

“... have been many good biographies of Khrushchev, the best of them Mark Frankland’s 1967 study and Edward Crankshaw’s Khrushchev: A Career (1966). Taubman refers to Crankshaw’s opinions rather seldom and then warily, as if uneasy about possible comparisons. But there is no fair comparison to be made. Crankshaw wrote while the Cold War still ...”

“... Session. No other reigning sovereign had visited the principal university buildings since King Edward VII opened them in 1905. Six months before the Queen’s visit, the Vice-Chancellor, Professor J.M. Whittaker, put to his recently-appointed Professor of English Literature a ‘general idea’ – to celebrate the Queen’s visit by reviving the masques ...”

“... joy was short-lived because the pardon was rescinded the next day. The president had not, it was said, appreciated the nature and extent of Toussie’s previous criminal offending. Nor had he known of substantial donations made by Toussie’s father and other members of his family to John McCain’s presidential campaign a few months earlier, which (it was ...”

“... reflex disbelief in the cynical, or anyone who has actually visited the place. What is being said, loud and bold, online and on fences around hidden development sites, seems to be the absolute contrary of what is all too visibly there. That is the first rule of the river. And it leads to an unavoidable question: what are the consequences for these ...”

“... it is not) an official biography, he has evidently depended on or even worked fairly closely with Edward Mendelson, perhaps Auden’s ‘scholar-in-chief’, his literary executor and the editor who worked directly according to his wishes. And yet legends afflict Mendelson’s work as well. After his edition of the Collected Poems, which retains Auden’s own ...”

“... of communism, we are no longer sure that ‘the golden age is within us,’ as Lévi-Strauss said, but there’s no doubt that the apocalypse is. And the fear of nuclear war is heightened by the raw, primordial tenor of our politics, above all in the United States. What Pankaj Mishra has called an ‘age of anger’ is also an age of disinhibition, at ...”

“... of the best stories come in Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron by the adventurer Edward John Trelawny, and so are a bit too good to be quite true, but they are evidence of the way Shelley came across. Trelawny’s account of Shelley’s attempt to learn how to swim in a deep pool in the Arno catches the thing very well:He doffed his jacket ...”

“... drawings were presented to me by a very ill man,’ the catalogue entry read, quoting Edward Adamson, the art therapist who first encountered J.J. Beegan in 1946. By the time they met, Adamson explained, Beegan ‘had been in a locked ward in the hospital for many years. He was incontinent and unable to speak clearly. He drew vigorously on the ...”