“... You know the left think that I am conservative,’ Hannah Arendt once said, ‘and the conservatives think I am left or I am a maverick or God knows what. And I must say that I couldn’t care less. I don’t think the real questions of this century get any kind of illumination by this kind of thing.’ The Jewish Writings make the matter of her political affiliation no less easy to settle ...”

“... setting, such as a big house, intensifies these conflicting pressures. (Alison Light has said that Christie’s novels can be read as ‘one huge advertisement of the murderousness of English social life and of the desperate need to convert to pleasure all those anxieties which an existence like that of the postwar middle classes could ...”

“... hundred members. ‘The vast majority are cleaners, bicycle couriers and security guards,’ he said. ‘There’s a whole goldmine of opportunity out there, in low-paid, outsourced work.’ So many people want to join the IWGB, he went on, that they don’t have the resources to cope: ‘We’ve put a temporary freeze on membership. We’re turning people ...”

“... is not actually mentioned). He is ‘bound to Justifie an informacion he hath given against the said parties for incontinency: 3 men with one woman in a bed’. And so the scene is set for the brief courtroom drama of 1 December 1613. This takes place in the newly erected Sessions House in Clerkenwell, known as Hicks Hall because it was built by the rich ...”

“... of the farm at Lochlie, which came to an end, with his father’s death, in 1784. W.P. Ker once said of it that it reverts to ‘the old allegorical, didactic form’, that ‘there is some connection between Burns’s “Vision” and the vision of Boethius.’ James Kinsley’s encyclopedic Oxford edition of the poems and songs has traced this ...”

“... young. ‘I want to be one of the greatest writers who have ever lived,’ Scott Fitzgerald said to his friend Edmund Wilson when they were just out of college, ‘don’t you?’ Wilson was the son of a lawyer, a bit chilly, a prodigious reader steeped in Plato and Dante. He thought Fitzgerald’s remark foolish – just what you might expect from a ...”

“... as opinion-makers in the lesser arts fell into step. The Post-Modern is a matter of façade, they said, without any promise of depth. It soaks up and squeezes out but does not judge the commercial culture it is compelled to treat as a second nature. This claim, too, had been made first in architecture, by Robert Venturi: ‘The main justification of the ...”

“... to the accompaniment of rhetorical music. Jefferson, Mississippi is the centre, Faulkner once said, of a ‘cosmos’ inhabited by people whom he could move around ‘like God’. Eudora Welty’s people live mostly in, or near, small free-floating towns like Morgana, with its water tank and courthouse and its ‘Confederate soldier on a shaft’ that ...”

“... enjoyment and the central means to political understanding and intervention. Peter Brook once said he himself had no sense of history as a reality: ‘History to me is a way of looking at things, and-not one that interests me very much’; the artist’s vision is concerned with the present. This view, whatever may be ...”

“... and helpful – in fact, just true. ‘A writer must die every day he lives, be reborn, as it is said in the Burial Service, an incorruptible self, that self opposite of all that he has named “himself”.’ The theory certainly most beautifully fits Conrad, that least stoical, most volatile and hypochondriacal of men, who nevertheless created imperishable ...”

“... for British settler colonies like Rhodesia. While it was Britain’s ‘earnest desire’, he said, to give South Africa, a fellow member of the Commonwealth, its ‘support and encouragement’, ‘some aspects of your policies … make it impossible for us do this.’ ‘Our policy,’ he added, quoting a speech made by his foreign secretary, Selwyn ...”

“... physicists, above all Werner Heisenberg’s: Heisenberg, the winner of the 1932 Nobel Prize, was said to be the head of Hitler’s atom bomb effort. He had also been Edward Teller’s PhD supervisor at Leipzig in 1930. In December 1944, the OSS, the CIA’s wartime predecessor, ordered one of its agents in ...”

“... Stravinsky, utterly uncharacteristically, broke down and wept: He was finished as a composer, he said; the Rake would be his last work. What was more, he felt exposed by Schoenberg’s mastery and incriminated by the years in which he, Stravinsky, had written serialism off as some kind of fin de siècle number-mysticism or chemical experimentation. Craft ...”

“... reaction he sometimes has to face from audiences. At one point, ‘a guy got really angry. He said it wasn’t the audience’s fault they didn’t get what I was doing and I should be better at my job. I thought there was going to be a fight, as he came down to the stage and was hanging about in a menacing way. I had to come out of character and ...”

“... the logic of its principle and the grammar of its intuition’. Johnson, no doubt, would have said he had reality as well as principle to deal with as he pushed through legislation (such as the Civil Rights Act) that Kennedy did not live to fight for. In doing this rough work he proved the classic if wily liberal, the man whom his biographer Robert Caro ...”