“... the south-east coast of Sicily and then again at Salerno, had gone so badly, causing many hundreds more fatalities than had been expected, that it was only prudent of my father to anticipate his own death at Anzio. What he now needed was to write something that would serve as a last letter if he was killed tomorrow, but wouldn’t unduly upset Monica with ...”

“... that ‘I am old and I feel and look old.’ Her frankness is rare. Old age, as it becomes more common, is talked about less. If old people are praised for anything it is usually for being ‘splendid’ in some unspecified way which really means, as Miller points out, that they don’t look or seem truly old. In obituaries of long-lived public figures ...”

“... of actors, dramatists, theatre managers, with extraordinary assiduity; indeed, over a period of more than forty years he seems to have known everyone: politicians, poets, novelists, painters, journalists, soldiers, clerics, even civil servants if they were sufficiently close to ministers to be worth knowing. During the 1790s, when the social networks in ...”

“... the Restoration, and hanged at Tyburn in a posthumous execution. The Tyburn Tree plaque seems even more modest when compared with the elephantine public sculptures that have been deposited at Cumberland Gate. In a poem written for a BBC documentary in 1968, John Betjeman described the site as a place of martyrdom ‘trodden by unheeding feet’. The ...”

“... in Washington brought ecstatic reviews (‘we know of no pianist like him at any age ... something more than extraordinary’). He played once in New York and Columbia Records offered him a contract on the spot – which was unheard of. His first recording with Columbia – Bach’s Goldberg Variations – was the best-selling classical record of 1956 and ...”

“... telling pen-portraits. Beschloss has benefited from the accumulation of memoirs, and of US and, more recently, Soviet archive material, over the intervening years. He has also gained from the release of translator’s notes of the Vienna summit in 1961, from White House conversations taped by Kennedy (years before Nixon), and from the records of conferences ...”

“... In his novels, the late Gwyn Thomas used to refer to those who frequented the pubs and cafés of small Welsh towns as ‘the voters’. It would certainly be the way to describe the adult population of France who, last spring, voted twice to elect a President (on 24 April and 8 May) and twice to elect a Parliament (on 5 and 12 June ...”

“... of Romanticism, the neglect of Lecky and new-wave social science, the scatological treatment of Thomas Carlyle. Other omissions may be added. Frederic Maitland is not very well realised, which is strange given the historians (Kenyon among them) who believe in his greatness. Maitland’s relationship with Leslie Stephen and avid interest in Meredith’s ...”

“... identity has been embodied in daily sequences of radio and television programmes. Those at the more serious end of the broadcasting spectrum, and their manner of presentation, afford an ideal barometer of cultural health – better, for example, than any study of reading habits. Called in today to construct a serious radio network, which criteria would one ...”

“... the less respectable details of her life. She was not, in fact, Mrs Leonowens, widow of Major Thomas Leonowens of the Indian Army, but the widow of a mere Mr Owens (given name, Thomas Leon), identified on his death certificate as a ‘Hotel Master’ in the British settlement of Penang. Her father was a poor army ...”

“... Dante in America; T.S. Eliot’s polemical espousing of Dante’s austere sense of the world (more congenial to him than Shakespeare’s) set the Commedia squarely in the modern poetic mind as a text to be studied. There are poetic possibilities in Dante – the high drama of religious judgment, the seductive terza rima, the historical portrayals of ...”

“... from North Africa in the fourth and fifth centuries, would be debated as matters of life and death more than a thousand years later in Calvin’s Geneva and in the American colonies – even in some modern Nonconformist churches. We may envy a tradition so firmly established, though cruelty and fanaticism seemed inevitable adjuncts of theological certitude. It ...”

“... an elegy, but also a celebration, whose choppy, lengthy, remixed lines showed how some gay men of (more or less) his generation put together a subculture in which they might rebuild lives. Powell learned that he had HIV shortly after he finished writing Tea: his unusual lines could model his friends’ (and his friends’ friends’ friends) bricolage, their ...”

“... with his novel Faggots. Fiction with homosexual content had trickled out through the century, from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice to Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar to the work of Genet and Isherwood and Baldwin and Burroughs, but as each new novel or play or poem appeared it was treated as a one-off; if the work was a critical success it was despite ...”

“... the brink of starvation. The stark new multistorey cotton mills of Manchester and Salford employed more and more men, women and children. Textiles, however, were still mostly produced in the traditional way by handloom weavers, working at home or in small workshops in the towns and villages surrounding Manchester, which the ...”