“... whose words the whole dedication turns: John Webster, in the note ‘To the Reader’ before The White Devil. Browning’s Elizabethanised play has its affinities with Webster: moreover, it was canny of him to emend Webster’s prefatory words so as to reduce them to a single-minded praise of Shakespeare (and then of Landor). For these are not the very words ...”

“... at Reykjavik ‘resembled as nothing else the 1905 meeting between Tsar Nicholas II and Kaiser William II’. But the real difficulty is that to get at the kind of answers a historian of the Cold War now requires calls for access to the Russian archives. Before the war ended it was reasonable to act as if that day would never come. Now, to everyone’s ...”

“... literary opinions are just as forcefully expressed. There is a long list of enthusiasms: for William Howells and Ulysses S. Grant, for Logan Pearsall Smith, Frederick Prokosch, Edith Wharton, Leonardo Sciascia, Thomas Love Peacock and Henry Miller: ‘If he often sounded like the village idiot, that was because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the ...”

“... where he encountered modern art in the form of pictures by Gauguin, Wilson Steer, Augustus John, William Nicholson, and woodcuts by Kandinsky, collected by the University’s Vice-Chancellor. Frank Rutter, curator of Leeds Art Gallery, completed the boy’s artistic education. He had already begun to write poems, in free verse influenced by Imagism. Now he ...”

“... Books’, ‘Stories 1900-1939’ and so on – splendidly produced, with colour and black-and-white illustrations, and giving a good indication of what’s been available at various moments during this interesting period. We have only to glance at the catalogue to see how the Edwardian idea of manliness was purveyed for adolescent boys (‘A Lad of ...”

“... their children. Colin Osman is a retired gentleman who lives in Cockfosters. His plumage is white and grey; his eyes are fast-moving; and his body is wonderfully puffed-up and proud. Mr Osman has devoted much of his life to the sport of pigeon-racing, just as his father did, and as his grandfather did before that. It used to be the most popular ...”

“... story of the fall in paradise, and rewrites it in the bleakest terms. This is a book that makes William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the most eminent of its literary forefathers, look like a study in innocence – perhaps because its undeviating gaze focuses on Eve, not Adam. Like Atwood, Wiggins places her fall in remembered history. Charlotte and ...”

“... of 1849 and the expansion of the railways. Stereotyping flourished; in The Yellow Peril (1982), William F. Wu writes that the Chinese in America ‘were viewed as inscrutable, wildly excitable, of low intelligence, and of high and complex intelligence ... as extremely able workers yet low on the evolutionary scale. Occupational stereotypes include tong ...”

“... backsides: The military bullocks loomed at us from the windows of the bus. They looked like huge white one-eyed sea monsters in a tank. The nasty ink black eyes of the anuses stared at us. They were very malevolent and they seemed to be surrounded by murky perimeters that varied in their shades of darkness. Place beside this an episode from The Witches of ...”

“... of meaning and reference. ‘At least one reader’ turns out, fifty pages later, to have been William Empson. Brown refers, with irrefutable accuracy, to ‘an American woman actress’, ‘Infidelity’ seems to have some occult meaning for him, because he alludes, in a passage about ‘The Dead’, to Gabriel’s ‘fascination with his wife’s ...”

“... likely extent of his readers’ acquirements. A great many people know that dentists commonly wear white jackets; a smaller but still substantial section of society has had the opportunity of observing that stewards on passenger aircraft are (or at one time were) similarly attired. Almost anybody of sufficient education to find the word ‘haemophilia’ even ...”

“... was so excessive that it failed to take on. It urged Australians to cut all their ties with the white man’s culture and to develop a new art and literature based on that of the aborigines, the folk who had lived longest in contact with the soil. Despite its muddled thinking and its impossible demands on artists, it was a healthy reaction against overseas ...”

“... in a quite unprecedented way on their right to pass judgment on the deeds of important dead white males, and to tell and publish the story of the polities that they lived in. Bridget Hill neglects this broader intellectual context for a more narrowly biographical approach in this study of Catharine Macaulay, but hers is still a considerable achievement ...”

“... living room. ‘I’m biting the baby,’ he said. ‘D’ you want to?’ The baby was lying on a white towelling nappy and Moggie was bent over her, biting her arms and then her legs and then the cheeks of her face. He said he did it all the time and that the baby liked it. He said it was like tickling. I didn’t want to do it but said I’d stay and ...”

“... was drawn in the Sixties into political action, and had joined the 1971 demonstrations outside the White House protesting the bombing of North Vietnam. When Salter asked Clampitt if she had ever wanted children, she replied: ‘Oh no, when we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima I knew that this wasn’t a world I wanted to bring children ...”