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“... it is words that are the spring of action. (‘This tongue that runs so roundly in thy head,’ Richard II says, ‘Should run thy head from thy unreverent shoulders.’) The Crown has few pretences, and it isn’t Shakespeare, but it sets up a properly sophisticated relationship between words and actions, a relationship in which saying and not saying is ...”

“... Copland. The following year her choreography for Oklahoma! revolutionised Broadway. The composer Richard Rodgers had just left his lyricist Lorenz Hart for Oscar Hammerstein II, and the new team realised that the usual dance razzmatazz wasn’t going to be right for a show about cowboys and farmers at the turn of the century. Before Rodeo, de Mille, who was ...”

“... and syntax (both quite dreadful). Gibran produced a small body of writings in Arabic and in English, and managed to be soupily soulful and vaguely prophetic in both languages. He also painted – Robin Waterfield’s biography is good on the recurring features of his art, including its ‘vague ectoplasmic figures, often female’ and the ‘veil of ...”

“... a lengthy visual and aural collage, a sort of television series trying to forget about television. Richard Brody describes the result as ‘a kind of working through on screen of the network of associations that formed in Godard’s movie-colonised unconscious’. The key idea here, which appears again and again in French thinking about cinema, is ...”

“... that they’re growing. I think that they’re desperate.’ I heard about hope. I heard General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, say: ‘I came away more positive than I’ve ever been. I think we’re getting some momentum built up.’ I heard about happiness. I heard Lieutenant General James Mattis say that ‘it’s a lot of fun to ...”

“... he gets rave reviews from all sorts of famous people. The president of the Federal Republic, Richard von Weizsäcker, sends Stern a note to tell him that he had read one of his lectures ‘with liveliest interest and gratitude’; McGeorge Bundy says that he thought another piece ‘uncommonly good’ and Lionel Trilling found an earlier draft of it ...”

“... more than individual taste is involved. He put the point more emphatically in a letter to Richard Aldington, who had initially been a very close collaborator but who by this date was showing signs of the touchiness and divergence of views which would eventually lead him to break with Eliot. Aldington had submitted a wayward, impressionistic essay on ...”

“... subject to delays. The obscure origins of the University are carefully reconstructed. In Sir Richard Southern’s distinction, Oxford was not ‘created’ – it ‘emerged’. The contributors explain the significance of its geographical location and its importance as a centre of legal activity. They discuss how it separated from the town and the ...”

“... anachronistic, antiqued model of “good literature”’; he quoted the naturalist Richard Mabey, who, like Fisher, had known and loved that coast for years. To read Sebald, according to Mabey, was to watch the belittlement of ‘a very close friend’.Fisher’s first book, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? was published towards the ...”

“... a sustained insider’s account of how ordinary people lived from day to day in a pre-industrial English village. On Thursday 27 December 1756 two of Turner’s neighbours, Thomas Fuller and William Piper, arrived uninvited and stayed smoking and drinking (‘sponging,’ their host records bitterly) until they began to quarrel, because Tho. Fuller told ...”

“... the confidence to write the poems he did? It is impossible to imagine the scion of a distinguished English family using that family now as a basis for poetic composition. But all Lowell’s poems are about being a Lowell, or rather, more specifically, about being this Lowell. Only in the home of democracy, probably, could the personality of the poet as ...”

“... Glendinning puts it, by ‘a committee of aunts’. There was no shortage of cousins, Irish and English. One of them, Audrey Fiennes, became her lifelong friend and confidante.Bowen was later to recall that transplantation to England at an early and impressionable age established a ‘cleft’ in her between ‘heredity’ and ‘environment’. Heredity ...”

“... course of 1900, before either of her children had left home, she began a relationship with another English teacher, a woman called Mary Norcross, younger than her, a friend of the family, again ‘our kind’. Being in love with a woman, sleeping together, sometimes living together: none of it was a big deal, Leavell stresses: there was a lot of that sort of ...”

“... funny business, complaining that ‘Dogleaf, or whatever his name is, couldn’t understand plain English’). Lydia managed to keep her nice girl image, but she learned more about showbiz than art. Demoted to a ‘toe dancer’ in musical interludes sandwiched into popular musicals, playing vaudeville alongside ‘Loughlin’s bicycle-riding dogs’ and ...”

“... race, amongst us, yet not of us. And the East End produces no type of man or woman so unfit, un-English, and morally and personally so alien as the pauper immigrant.’ Bengali immigrants are thought of as the most impoverished and the most recent arrivals in the East End. In fact, they have been coming here for over two hundred years. Throughout the 19th ...”