“... W. The second lesson was that – with some important exceptions like the work of Barrington Moore, Jr – the extension of political science to comparative politics tended to proceed, consciously or unconsciously, on the basis of the US example: one measured how far other countries were progressing in approximating America’s liberty, respect for ...”

“... NHS since its inception in 1948. In a gratifyingly compressed, although at times grey, account, Charles Webster concludes that the Ely episode brought ‘a fresh spirit of determination’ to the care of long-stay patients. It did more than that: it released additional money, spurred improvements in hospital facilities and raised standards of ...”

“... in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1886, the only daughter and second child of the second marriage of Charles Doolittle, professor of astronomy and mathematics and Civil War veteran, and Helen Wolle, from a Moravian background, whose family had long been resident in the area. (Moravian Christians were heirs to the dissident, pietistic, communal ethos of the ...”

“... were newly in the air). The notion that the Victorians had had a surfeit of Wilberforce, Hannah Moore, Bowdler and the rest would have been worth pursuing, but it is only hinted at, then shied away from. The problem of the initial bounds of the subject – what is being claimed to grow out of what, and when – is perhaps the most unsatisfactory single ...”

“... are his selected diaries, Joseph Cornell’s Theatre of the Mind, edited by Mary Ann Caws, and Charles Simic’s prose poems, an inspired labour of love called Dime Store Alchemy.Cornell’s life as an artist began the day he showed his Ernst-inspired collages to Julien Levy, whose gallery brought Surrealism to America. Levy asked Cornell to design the ...”

“... And change is bound to come. Some parts of the organisation have already experienced it. Chris Moore’s Going Gone: How Newsrooms Die is the latest and best-written in a series of memoirs chronicling the recent history of the BBC and specifically the World Service.* Moore and I were both World Service lifers, but never ...”

“... His more typical correspondents are his business agents in the Greek islands, his banker friend Charles Barry in Genoa, and the Greek Committee in London. The tone is, according to your taste, practical or already middle-aged. Perhaps, as Marchand suggests, the Greek leader Prince Mavrocordatos was flattering Byron and encouraging him to spend more of his ...”

“... foretaste of the ICRC’s most famous silence, which provides the opening, and the pivot, of Moore-head’s book: the failure to condemn the Nazis’ annihilation of European Jewry. As the first independent researcher to have access to the Red Cross archives up to 1945, Moorehead is uniquely placed to assess this episode. She shows conclusively that by ...”

“... little, or perhaps it’s the other way round. Elsewhere Auden quotes from one of his touchstones, Charles Williams, who writes of overwhelming yet undefinable moments, those in which ‘a hand lighting a cigarette is the explanation of everything; a foot stepping from the train is the rock of all existence.’ From the start, the Auden effect was an odd blend ...”

“... Bishop are evoked with a real warmth. When Bloom considers a poem at length, as he does Marianne Moore’s extraordinary poem ‘Marriage’, he often takes you places you never thought you might go. But these chapters can display the anxiety of someone who wanted to show he was standing his ground against the school of resentment even when he was operating ...”

“... Young’s sociology), in the messy, chaotic work of Eduardo Paolozzi and Art Brut (‘Fuck Henry Moore’ was one slogan), in vernacular architecture, in industrial buildings, and in Hollywood films and advertising. Their buildings were meant to be noisy; for Banham, exemplars include Lasdun’s ‘Cluster Block’ at Keeling House in Bethnal Green, and Park ...”

“... round the much larger antique centre in Philip Webb’s parish hall. 6 January. Papers full of Charles Kennedy being, or having been, an alcoholic. I’d have thought Churchill came close and Asquith, too, and when it comes to politics it’s hardly a disabling disease. Except to the press. But less perilous, I would have thought, to have a leader ...”

“... beaches? Who would? Yet she pulls it off, and we are slack-jawed and mildly horrified. Marianne Moore would say that she is ‘too unrelenting’ in The Colossus, her first book of poems; Robert Lowell would put the same thought another way by saying that in Ariel she was playing ‘Russian Roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder’. I also remember ...”

“... year Swift published an extract from McGahern’s unpublished first novel. It was spotted by Charles Monteith at Faber, who went on to oversee the publication of many of McGahern’s books. When Swift read the first part of another novel – to be called The Barracks – he wrote: ‘It’s a real advance. Very exciting. I still think the first book ...”

“... of art; but at the time there was lively curiosity and interchange between Paris and London. Charles Deschamps, who sold Henry Hill his pictures, was a patron and friend of Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown and Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and later of Whistler. Monet came to London to avoid the Franco-Prussian War, Pissarro to avoid political persecution; both ...”