“... in the 20th century alone – and blinded and disfigured many more. It was, as Thomas Macaulay said, ‘the most terrible of all the ministers of death’, and its preferred targets were children. In the past, you may have had something like a one in three chance of getting the disease and, if you did get it, a one in five chance of dying, though some ...”

“... formation. Describing the incident to the East Oregonian shortly afterwards, he said that the objects were ‘flat like a pie pan and somewhat bat-shaped’, and that they moved ‘like a saucer would if you skipped it across water’. In a report published the following day, a writer for the Associated Press used the phrase ‘flying ...”

“... the second was ‘a gloss on the word “lot” in “Whispers of Immortality” ’ (‘he said it meant “kind”, not “fate”, and conceded that it perhaps violated the diction of that particular poem’); ‘the third,’ Kenner reveals, ‘had reference to cheese.’ Hard Cheddar, perhaps? The preliminary matters matter, then, but they are ...”

“... and Müntzer (if he had swallowed the Holy Ghost, feathers and all, you still could not trust him, said Luther); the Visitor, church controller and bureaucrat; and Barrabas, the strident, truculent activist, despoiler of the Church. John King’s copiously documented and appendixed survey is concerned with a time when More and Luther and their trouble were ...”

“... us) better off, while making nobody worse off. Everyone’s a winner. It’s here that Robert and Edward Skidelsky’s argument cuts in. Their main target is the pursuit of growth for its own sake which, as they say, has become dogma for politicians across the globe: certainly ‘mainstream’ politicians usually assume that when it comes to output, big is ...”

“... of the Lincoln Brigade. When Hoover complained that three COI employees were communists, Donovan said: ‘That’s why I hired them.’ Hoover referred to COI as ‘Roosevelt’s folly’, while the Goebbels propaganda machine derided Donovan’s ‘Jewish scribblers’.Six months after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt dissolved the unwieldy COI. A new Office of War ...”

“... systems around Russia’s borders. It began just over a year ago in Georgia. Mikheil Saakashvili said then that his country would be the first in the post-Soviet zone (the Baltic Republics apart) to follow the path opened by the nations of East and Central Europe 15 years earlier. If the peaceful uprising in Ukraine succeeds (and it is too early to know how ...”

“... women must be quarantined like the plague they are’). The necessary result of all this, Rodger said, was his ‘War on Women’, in the course of which he would ‘punish all females’ for the crime of depriving him of sex. He would target the Alpha Phi sorority, ‘the hottest sorority of UCSB’, because it contained ‘the very girls who represent ...”

“... right thinking and optimism – an attack on the establishment. Wanted to disturb them,’ he said. ‘I could just hear my father saying: "Why do you want to look at these scenes, they’re depressing. Why don’t you look at the nice things in life?”’ Then, towards the end of his life, when he was teaching photography at Yale, he encouraged his ...”

“... account of that country somewhat nearer the truth than the version of those who took what he said as an apology for Fascism. Nor even that he despised parliamentary politics. After all, the generation before his – Proust, Mann, Joyce, Lawrence, Yeats, Shaw and T.S. Eliot – despised democracy. Nor was Catholicism the mark of a deviant at a time when ...”

“... by freelance contributors. So Max mentioned my name to the appropriate editor, Ralph Hegley, and said that I could write obituaries of philosophers and intellectuals. Hegley asked to have lunch with me. We met at a restaurant in Covent Garden – expensive Italian, snowy tablecloths, steamroom hush, Pompeian ruins of cheese on a silent trolley. We sat at a ...”

“... people were adapting and tailoring the formulae before them. The shift towards iconoclasm under Edward is charted, and we are shown the increasing readiness of Protestants to answer yes to Archbishop Arundel’s old question: ‘were it a fair thing to come into a church and see therein none image?’ The conspicuous exception to this trend, as many readers ...”

“... become logical and correct.’ When a man can say both so much and so little on this subject (he said it in 1939 when he was 33) it is difficult to predict how he will react to misfortune or indeed what he will consider to be misfortune. The letters hold several surprises. When in 1948 his wife decided to become a Catholic all hell broke loose. As no ...”

“... In 1930, Steinbeck met the most influential figure in the formation of his writer’s philosophy, Edward Ricketts. A maverick marine zoologist, Ricketts was adopted by Steinbeck as his guru; he passed down to his disciple the biological materialism that was to run through all the subsequent writing (its most memorable expression is Rose of Sharon’s suckling ...”

“... Janda, a peasant, when asked where he obtained the libels he was spreading about the priesthood, said: in the book of a Saxon soldier. He [the parish priest] answered me: That isn’t possible, one cannot understand those books immediately! And me, I proposed to him to give me whatever book he wanted. I would read it to him one time only, and then I would ...”