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“... His face lit up: I’m from Palestine, too, he said, from Jaffa. Ibrahim was studying with Philip Hitti, a Lebanese immigrant who had established a leading department of ‘Oriental Studies’ – meaning mainly Arab history and culture. He introduced me to the other Arab graduate students, and in no time at all I had a small group of older friends ...”

“... and other dramatists of the time. Then think of the medieval minstrels and ballad-singers, who drew great audiences in village or castle to hear them recite poems. Think of the peasants in Russia, in Ireland, in Spain, in many other countries, still making up their own poems. In his ‘Lecture on the Uses of Poetry’, William Cullen Bryant, the great ...”

“... concept of freedom, Skinner had, as he warmly acknowledged, an ally in the political theorist Philip Pettit. But there is a subtle distinction between their positions. Whereas Pettit emphasises non-domination as the leitmotif of a tradition of republican freedom, Skinner thinks that the primary feature of this strain of liberty was the absence of ...”

“... house that specialised in oysters. He liked to collect the shells. I have one here as I write: he drew on them with a pen to reveal the faces of Greek gods in their crevices. Norman knew everybody in the place and he asked for a kind of vodka punch. He always drank horrible drinks: at one point, back at his house, he asked me to make him a rum and grapefruit ...”

“... history (even though the story wends its way from Thomas Wolfe through Nabokov and John Barth, Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates, all the way to Raymond Carver), nor those of traditional aesthetics and literary criticism, which raise issues of value and try to define true art as this rather than that. The dialectical problems come in the reversals of class ...”

“... historians should consult his remarks on X, Catacomb, and the New English Weekly edited by Philip Mairet, a man of integrity and enthusiasm whom Sisson affectionately evokes: ‘his eyes would light up as visibly as the bulbs on a pin-table, as the ideas rattled round.’ The bohemian world of poets, painters and little magazines, the ‘natural ...”

“... the latter end, are apt to be labelled merely “episodes”.’ (Towards the end of 1914 Sorley drew a parallel between Gretchen and Belgium, presumably with Faust as Germany.) His complaint to the Master was that Faust dried up the creative instincts in other people: ‘There is nothing that I have ever thought or ever read that is not somewhere contained ...”

“... woman, stood by Oscar with her husband with great determination, but, as this scene suggests, she drew the line at being high-minded about him. Max was unimpressed too, although his common sense is not coldheartedness. He stood by Oscar, but he was not deceived about him. He saw that success had made him arrogant: ‘gross not in body only – he did become ...”

“... there is much to support Taylor’s view. MI5, the Director of Public Prosecutions, and Sir Philip Myers, Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary, had all supported John Stalker’s efforts to get the tape he wanted. He had made abundantly clear where those enquiries were leading. The only obstructive figure was Sir John Hermon. Nor does Colin ...”

“... an adopted religion into his writing. Heading to California, he backpacks with Zen companions Philip Whalen and Gary Snyder, but only gets drunker and lonelier and unhappier. When last we see him, he is typing up grandiose autodidactic meditation manuals and ‘spiritual bromide’ sutras in a rustic cabin in thought-free California, victim of a fear of ...”

“... than a dozen speeches called the Philippics, after Demosthenes’ almost equally nasty attacks on Philip of Macedon, three centuries earlier. The chase had degenerated into an elaborate, occasionally comic game of hide-and-seek, with Cicero torn between holing up in his villa to wait for the inevitable knock on the door and making a speedy getaway by ...”

“... her valiant attempt to bring a bohemian spirit to a corporate building. With the help of Philip Johnson, MoMA’s first architecture curator, who had recently set up his own practice, Lambert spent six weeks travelling around America interviewing the most prominent practitioners of the International Style. She divided them into three ...”

“... daring as a challenge to the optimistic tenets of socialist realism. The premieres of these works drew such hysterical applause that they amounted almost to political demonstrations. Even the older works now acquired resonance of a quasi-oppositional kind. Attending a performance of the Leningrad Symphony in the early 1970s, the musicologist Richard ...”

“... Richard Cobb, often in a class as small as an early Christian cenacle, was to be taught life,’ Philip Mansel recalled. ‘He did not simply describe, he transformed himself into a farmer overeating merely for the pleasure of depriving Parisians of their food; a revolutionary who had marinated in envy all his life and was using his position on the Committee ...”

“... including Bethe. When Bethe himself was put to the test by an assault on his Cornell colleague, Philip Morrison, he sprang to Morrison’s defence, though it was perhaps less daunting for Bethe to stand up to a university committee of inquiry than it was for Oppenheimer to face down the rampaging House Committee on Un-American Activities. And, while ...”