“... called madness. Prideaux writes of his paranoia, but – one neurosis not excluding another – he may also have suffered from manic depression. Periods of intense productivity rapidly succeeded others of total fallowness; amiability followed reclusiveness and misanthropy. ‘I never go anywhere. I hate human beings,’ he told Isadora Duncan. One might say ...”

“... from Philip IV, also in the female line, but now in the third generation. While the argument may have been relevant in the 1320s, when Philip IV’s last son died, it was meaningless by 1453, after more than a hundred years of war. By then it was obvious that no matter his heredity, a king of England couldn’t be king of France, precisely because he was ...”

“... for Trinity term 1996, I find that the Professor of Poetry, James Fenton, will give a lecture on 9 May entitled Eliot v. Julius. It would be improper of me to anticipate Fenton’s approach to Anthony Julius’s compelling study, but I would hope that he will not see fit to mount another repudiation of this brilliant, passionately concentrated ‘adversarial ...”

“... to advertise their prospective clients in this way? Elsewhere among the crosses and headstones one may find Upton Sinclair, Nobel laureate and defeated Socialist candidate for the governorship of California, Alice Warfield Mien (mother of Wallis Simpson) and Alice Roosevelt Longworth, grande dame of Washington dynastic bitchery. (She had a motto emblazoned on ...”

“... the left-wing filmmakers Joseph Losey, Carl Foreman and Abraham Polonsky, the screenwriters Richard Collins, Ring Lardner Jr and Waldo Salt, the critics Harold Clurman and Ken Tynan, the musicians Larry Adler and Yip Harburg, as well as Ingrid Bergman, Constance Cummings and Katharine Hepburn. Most of the expatriate film people Sayre met in Frognal had ...”

“... for the narrator’s habitual academic delivery, one baulks at this stilted sentence: ‘You may be ever so much of a gentleman and a privy councillor, but if you have a daughter you cannot be secure of immunity [my italics] from that petty bourgeois atmosphere...’ This is exceptional and no worse than Hingley’s maladroit update in ...”

“... the public emotion. These long poems are not well known in the West, and it is very useful to have Richard Chappell’s version of 1905 in a paperback edition, with a translation in similar rhythms opposite the Russian. Equally valuable are Michael Harari’s Russian plus English translation of the poems written between 1955 and 1959, published in the same ...”

“... competition of vulgar ‘empiricks’, often peddled their own proprietary nostrums. The great Dr Richard Mead hawked a rabies powder under his own name; Dr Hans Sloane marketed medicinal chocolate; Dr Nehemiah Grew took out a patent on Epsom Salts. How to make a medical reputation in such a world? How to make a medical living? A satirist advised the upwardly ...”

“... almost ineradicable. Bale’s previous book, The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron, like Richard Hayton’s Reconstructing Conservatism?, attempted to explain how the party lost its way for so long, and then, eventually, found a path back into office, though not to single-party government. As late as the Tory semi-recovery of 2005, Bale notes, the ...”

“... a line of historical inevitability.’ In an attack on the whole ‘what if?’ genre of history, Richard J. Evans has suggested that ‘in practice … counterfactuals have been more or less a monopoly of the Right’ with Marxism as target. That’s not necessarily true of the Brenton volume, despite the inclusion of right-wing political historians like ...”

“... listening posts and much of the signals intelligence they collect. A reader of a Five Eyes brief may not know which state has collected the information they’re looking at without consulting the technical data. The NSA is by far the most powerful signals intelligence agency in the world, but global surveillance is a shared effort of the Anglosphere.The ...”

“... between 1918 and 1925, when they married, has been edited by a niece and a nephew, Polly Hill and Richard Keynes, who rightly believe that it will be ‘of value and interest and will not offend their ghosts’. In an excellent introduction they admit that Lydia, in the early stages, must have worn herself out in flattering Maynard. She had abandoned her ...”

“... but exhilaratingly willing to enjoy variety in landscape and in peoples. The best thing about Richard Jenkyns’s book is its readiness to shift critical attention away from Virgil’s politics towards his treatment of places and their relation to history. As he shows, place in Virgil is charged with emotion, with complex political affiliations, and with ...”

“... concise manner of expression gives him a real claim to be considered a distinguished writer. Sir Richard Jebb (1842-1905) devoted the main effort of his life to the making of an edition of Sophocles with commentary. In certain technical respects he was surpassed by his German contemporaries, while to modern taste he seems to make Sophoclean tragedy too much ...”

“... believed that the late work was an inspired adaptation to apparently intolerable conditions: It may be safely said that the curious and unique development of the art of pastel that this obstacle compelled him to evolve would not have come into being but for his affliction. A large scale became a necessity. For the shiny medium of oil paint was substituted ...”