“... 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 ...”

“... conductors, dramatists, poets, philosophers, historians, politicians with something to say, said it on air, without undue constraint though never extempore – even supposedly spontaneous conversations were carefully scripted. Music was balanced with talk in a six-or-so-hour sequence each weekday night. You could sit and listen to one programme after ...”

“... New styles of architecture, new styles of advertising, also signalled the change of heart. Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, became the presiding genius of Madison Avenue; he made cigarette advertising sexy, and persuaded women to smoke Lucky Strikes. The age of euphemism gave way to the age of dysphemism; sex, suppressed by the matriarchs, came out ...”

“... Pimpernel. He was often compared with other practitioners of ‘history from below’, such as Edward Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Albert Soboul and George Rudé, even though their Marxism was anathema to him. His magnum opus, on the armées révolutionnaires, the semi-vigilante armed bands who enforced the Terror in the provinces in 1793-4, might, in ...”

“... World War.’ Sir Oswald, for example, always tried very strenuously to distance himself from said horrors after 1945 and, though he was unconvincing in his rewriting, at least made the attempt. His widow has never bothered even to feign that effort, and is sometimes too languid and spiteful to conceal her prejudices even now. The subject clearly fatigues ...”

“... tree of the virus and the rate at which it mutates. Bette Korber, the head of the research team, said she thought Hooper’s thesis was unlikely, but would not rule it out. Hooper does not pretend the OPV/Aids hypothesis is watertight; it is offered soberly, if insistently, as the theory which best fits the salient epidemiological facts: above all, the ...”

“... of the others. The excitement came about with the discovery by the American theoretical physicist, Edward Witten, of previously undetected further sets of symmetries (or ‘dualities’), which link various parts of the theory, in particular its reasonably well-understood low-energy aspects to the rather ill-understood high-energy ones, where it’s not even ...”

“... decades but was reopened in the wake of 9/11. ‘We have an opportunity,’ a police spokesman said, ‘to stop at least one more radical terrorist group from performing another act.’ There was no evidence that any of the SLA veterans had been involved in any kind of violent activity for two and a half decades. The SLA was not the only paramilitary left ...”

“... impressed Emperor Ferdinand III, who, despite meeting numerous foreign grandees, reportedly said that ‘I scarce ever met with an ambassador till now.’ Ferdinand added that were Roe a woman – and despite the fact that the Englishman was twice his age – he would have been smitten.In the instructions formulated for Roe’s embassy, James directed ...”

“... wished to avert ‘the heavy national judgment which is hanging over us’, Thomas Clarkson said in a sermon in 1787, they would have to ‘remove the stain of the blood of Africa’. For Wilberforce, ‘establishing a trade on true commercial principles’ would be a way of making ‘reparations to Africa’. This was as far as they ...”

“... Ireland Bill or the Conversion of the Consolidated Debt. Wilde continued these visits, ‘as he said later, out of liking for the only house in London where he did not have to stand on his head’. In his memoir The Trembling of the Veil, Yeats remembered Wilde the married man towards the end of the 1880s: He lived in a little house at Chelsea that the ...”

“... to think of the good chicken farmers of Norfolk. And as for British consumers, they can hardly be said to be grossly exploited when you can buy a small British chicken in Aldi for £1.87 and a medium bird for £3. The president of the British Veterinary Association and the head of food policy at Which? continue to insist that chlorine-washing chickens does ...”

“... They’re not going to stop,’ Joe McCarthy said of the Communists. ‘It’s right here with us now. Unless we make sure there’s no infiltration of our government, then just as certain as you sit there, in the period of our lives you will see a Red world.’ So began the 1954 Senate hearings on subversive influence in the army ...”

“... in his lifetime than Keats, with whom he shared a publisher). Clare was discovered in 1819, when Edward Drury, a young Stamford bookseller, wrote to his cousin John Taylor, who was also a bookseller – what we would now call a publisher – and told him that he had discovered a wholly untutored genius: Your hopes of good grammar and correct verse, depend ...”

“... beautiful comparison to Siamese cats could be the beginning of a poem, as the reference to Edward Hicks’s famous primitive painting suggests, but it didn’t happen. He says – it’s 1955 – that his ‘head is full of ideas for poems, these days, but they vanish as soon as I sit down’. He often asks Monica’s views on his poems and her ...”