“... I Ching seems unlike the man I knew. Lambert reveals that at Oxford he himself had a fling with Peter Brook whom I had thought a model of heterosexuality but who seduced Lambert via a silk dressing-gown and Chopin nocturnes on the gramophone. It’s something to be remembered nowadays when the sage of dthe modern theatre is taking himself too seriously ...”

“... Oxford, then drifted into the Oscar Wilde circle. He received a presentation copy of The Ballad of Reading Gaol from Wilde and spent six days with him in exile, before taking a calculated decision to drop him. At 21 he inherited money and after a spell at the Slade lived the life of an aesthete-dilettante: ‘with a friend he brought the young Jacob Epstein ...”

“... story of the Enlightenment’s steady diffusion outwards from its Parisian source. In the 1960s, Peter Gay gave them new power in his brilliant extended essay The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. Gay recognised the international dimensions of the Enlightenment, and included Scots, English, Germans and Italians as well as French in what he called the ...”

“... remaining intimates, though still a bone of contention gnawed by literati. Hardly anything worth reading twice about Burroughs’s writing, as distinct from his wildly chequered life and surprisingly genial personality, has appeared since Mary McCarthy’s New York Review essay on Naked Lunch in 1963. Negative reviews throughout his career consistently ...”

“... Revolution to the Civil War era, the picture became decidedly blurred, and Whiggery seemed to peter out. What was the connection between the two major upheavals of England’s so-called ‘century of revolutions’? How far was the Glorious Revolution of 1688 a consolidation of the gains of the chaotic English Revolution of the 1640s? The history of the ...”

“... were both written by scholars based in Europe. Yet in general, on the basis of my own experience, Peter Baldwin – an academic at UCLA who has also done research on transatlantic historical practice – is justified in claiming that ‘American historians are the most cosmopolitan.’* Different levels of economic resources, different pedagogic traditions ...”

“... years (a lazy idea anyway) does not fit his career. He was, and remains, a contrarian. The writer Peter Chotjewitz made the point cruelly a few years ago: Enzensberger was, he said, a political dandy, ‘a conductor who calls everyone aboard and then nips off on a train going in the opposite direction because it’s so wonderfully empty’. Chotjewitz is ...”

“... in the Ministry of Education and ever the brilliant talent scout, he secured the appointment of Peter Behrens as director of the Düsseldorf Academy. The same year he was instrumental in establishing the Deutsche Werkbund in Munich. The Werkbund was committed to design reform, as William Morris had been, but to reform that worked with industry not against ...”

“... Paxman), the Falklands War, Neil Kinnock, the Hitler Diaries and Bernard Ingham. A good friend of Peter Mandelson’s, he has long been close to the inner circles of New Labour. As well as there having been no pesky research to slow down the writing of the novel, there was also a strong imperative to publish it as soon as possible: Tony Blair’s topicality ...”

“... He revels in being the little man held back by the big bully, though you come to suspect after reading Bower’s book that little bullies are just as obnoxious. He decides to market Virgin Cola, and complains that Coca-Cola is taking unfair advantage of being the market leader, by, as it were, being the market leader. Actually, he seems to complain about ...”

“... to Augustus John. Forced into national service for 18 slack months, he spent most of the time reading, Joyce above all, and Ulysses became the subject of a first suite of etchings; old media attracted him as much as new. ‘Hamilton was fascinated by the skill, the virtuosity and the outrageous power of the command of language that gave Joyce the freedom ...”

“... The translators there are Lydia Davis, James Grieve, Mark Treharne, John Sturrock, Carol Clark, Peter Collier and Ian Patterson.The afterlife of Scott Moncrieff’s 1922-30 version is interesting too. First, not all of it is his. He died before he was able to turn to Proust’s last volume, which was translated first by Stephen Hudson and later by Andreas ...”

“... Sherlock Holmes’s first outing, but by the time Conan Doyle put pen to paper everyone was reading detective stories. In the intervening years they multiplied out of sensation and mystery novels, gothic melodramas, feuilletons, casebooks and crime reports and became a genre of their own. Few of the early works are read these days; fewer still are in ...”

“... religious and medical treatises, that can be subject to the same philological treatment, a close reading of terms that connect and complicate one another or diverge in signal ways.In his second section, Heller-Roazen considers people diminished in legal standing, whose situation inverts that of the vanished: the living body remains but civil rights are ...”

“... politics). There is also an Alan Watts name-drop and a lot of talk about Buddhism.It isn’t easy, reading the early pages of Travels over Feeling, to hang on to the timeline of Russell’s steep developmental itinerary. Some of this blurriness is characteristic of the man, but some is the result of a lack of editorial focus. (There’s an unfortunate typo on ...”