“... historical prudence is welcome, because it may well be that hysteria – this ‘Proteus’ as Thomas Sydenham called it in the 17th century – is never anything other than what we say about it, and that hysterics adapt themselves to doctors’ expectations and theories, thereby confirming them. This was the position maintained, notably, by Hippolyte ...”

“... the potter Lucy Rie and Gerhard Richter. Kate Brindley, the gallery’s director, boasted of a grant they’d won to build up a collection of postwar American drawings: ‘Middlesbrough will have drawings of a quality not yet in any other collection in the UK, not even Tate,’ she told me in her entirely white office; when she blinked, her eyelids flashed ...”

“... shining sea. Given the primitive state of transportation and communication in the early republic, Thomas Jefferson anticipated that two or more independent nations would eventually come into being, though he hoped they would live in peace, unlike the countries of Europe. One political leader who apparently tried to act on the idea of establishing a new nation ...”

“... his drinking bouts. Under the prosecutor’s eye he can be made to look like a less amiable Dylan Thomas. The merit of the stories and poems called in to excuse or justify such a life has also been questioned. D.H. Lawrence called ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ an overdone and vulgar fantasy. Yvor Winters said Poe’s was an art for servant girls. Both ...”

“... a new translation in rhyming iambic pentameter by A.E. Stallings, with illustrations by the etcher Grant Silverstein. The handsome large-format book, and the ingenious heroic couplets recounting the deeds of ‘King Pufferthroat’, ‘Morselsnatcher’ et al, suggest Mother Goose or Aesop. That’s one way to look at it. But with two introductions – one ...”

“... by public subscription. A decision will be announced later this year. The Scottish Executive Grant-in-Aid fund has already pledged £6.5m towards the purchase. A campaign to be headed, it’s hoped, by Sir David Attenborough and Scottish worthies is planned to drum up the missing millions. The publicity push, and a barrage of press handouts, are already ...”

“... With the deaths of Thomas Mann in 1955 and of Bertolt Brecht and Gottfried Benn in 1956, a major era in the history of German literature comes to an end. These three are not only the greatest writers of their age, they are also its witnesses. Each of them worked in a different genre: Thomas Mann in the convoluted, partly essayistic prose of his novels, Bert Brecht in the drama and narrative poetry of social dialectics, Benn in the lyrical poetry of radical Modernism ...”

“... His subject is an underworld within an underworld: certain followers of the proto-socialist Thomas Spence as they pursued their aims from the period of anti-Jacobin governmental action of the late 1790s, through Spa Fields, Peterloo and Cato Street, to the early years of Chartism. These men were not centre-stage in any of these events, nor were they in ...”

“... to support the king’s proceedings: those who would not, like Bishop Fisher of Rochester and Thomas More, went to the block, protesting that they died for the Catholic religion. For the king’s marriage had opened Pandora’s box. The pope, that gutless Medici by-blow Clement VII, was in the power of Catherine’s nephew Charles V, whose armies sacked ...”

“... The show was called Red Hot and Blue and was broadcast on crude equipment bought from the W.T. Grant five-and-dime store on Main. Out of nowhere, here was a white man playing ‘race music’ in a large, segregated Southern city with ‘an evangelical fervour that saw him shouting and singing along, to the increasing delight’ of an enormous new ...”

“... They sneer at ‘fellows with ideas’ or tell funny stories about Americans or admire Jimmy Thomas. It is all very painful and explains why so many of the young scientists here turn communist. Postan was astonished to find that the medievalists ignored the work of Marc Bloch and none of the lectures on political thought mentioned Marx. Brooke explains ...”

“... Bibliography, sociology, economic history periodically lay claim to it: none is prepared to grant it the dignity of a subject or area of study in its own right. In the past few years there were signs that publishing history might form itself into something coherent. There was the foundation of the learned journal, Publishing History, in 1977. Its ...”

“... a leading figure in the London Group of avant-garde artists, which included Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry, but Bloomsbury always had its £500 a year and rooms of its own. Lee, who had parted from Madge, though she would not grant him a divorce, was now in a relationship with the artist Diana Brinton, who was ...”

“... the solution in Germany. Support hotlines are advertised on the Berlin U-bahn, with a ‘starter grant’ of €1200 on offer to those who undertake to ‘self-deport’. Despite Smith’s willingness to consider the benefits of Fortress Europe, he prefers a solution he calls ‘bric-à-brac politics’ – a kind of muddling through. If, ‘one way or ...”

“... Endowment for the Humanities, has become a heroine to the Hurrah-for-Columbus forces by denying a grant to 1492: Clash of Visions, a documentary depicting Columbus in unflattering terms. Cheney said the film dwelt too heavily on Spanish human-rights abuses in Mexico and Peru and paid insufficient attention to Aztec atrocities. Forces intent on presenting a ...”