“... in 1953; there was an anniversary edition of the translation in 2003, with an introduction by Edward Said. Mimesis is an indispensable point of reference for anyone interested in comparative literature, close reading, theories of realism, long takes on literary history, the possibilities of scholarship without access to a major library, and much else. It ...”

“... a failed attempt at a redux in Syria in 1957, the Anglo-American operation to tunnel under East Berlin and tap its telephone lines, covert support for the mujahedin in Afghanistan, the false claim about the existence of Iraqi WMD. Kerbaj adds little to the histories of these cases. But his account contains useful information on some of the ruptures in the ...”

“... by Dower may be contemporary, but they display long-recognised kinds of muddled thinking. Edward Morgan, who drafted the majority report of the committee that investigated US intelligence failures leading up to Pearl Harbor, asked Admiral Husband Kimmel, commander of the naval base in Hawaii, why he’d failed to move his fleet despite warnings in ...”

“... stretch out so lowd …/So that I truly thought all These/Came to see Shore [Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV] or Pericles.’ On the page, as well as the stage, Pericles flourished: there were six typically error-stuffed quartos by 1635 (the first, of 1609, spelled Marina’s name incorrectly on the title page, and muddled verse with prose), meaning Pericles ...”

“... what sort of heroine she was going to be. When she had finished a 65,000-word novel celebrating Edward Sackville, a modest hero of the Civil War, she added a coy ‘author’s note’ – she was then 14 – in which she wondered whether he could see her and if he knew ‘how I wish to be like him’. (This coyness is infectious: Mrs Glendinning in her ...”

“... past absorbed by Cartier-Bresson also comprised such giants of photography as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen – and look! here’s Stieglitz himself, whose portrait Cartier-Bresson took in 1946, the lastyear of the great forerunner’s life. Stieglitz’s face has a weary look not unlike that of Robert Flaherty, father of the documentary film, another ...”

“... credentials of Garton Ash, by contrast, appear to be unalloyed. When he set out in 1978 for Berlin in his blue Alfa Romeo, Britain was not in question. Undistracted by doubts about the home country, he could throw himself more completely into patriotic causes beyond the Elbe. The result has been an impressive oeuvre, widening over two decades. After ...”

“... a Cold War climate. The earlier part involved Brittany, a large family house at Saint-Briac, and Berlin, where his father served as US Attorney. Kerry was the cosmopolitan, French-speaking child of high-hoping Americans, and he still gives the impression of being someone who has spent too many hours doing prep. At St Paul’s School in Concord (paid for by ...”

“... in being ‘emotionally detached and hard to please’, according to his sympathetic biographer, Edward Luce. He slept on hard floors to feel the discomfort experienced by the less fortunate. In his high school yearbook photo, ‘the eye is drawn to his hawklike nose and piercing gaze,’ Luce writes, and despite his desire to feel what the poor ...”

“... common view of Brecht’s Communist beliefs as psychopathology and his decision to work in East Berlin as opportunism or worse. Even today, they say, many can’t accept the simple notion that Brecht was a Marxist, a Communist sympathiser who hoped and believed that, given time, the creed he embraced would lead to better things, and that such an advancement ...”

“... correspondence with Queen Victoria alleged by Lord Esher in 1905 to have been destroyed by King Edward VII. Perhaps some of it was, but evidently much remains. I expressed the hope in the preface to my own book that one day ‘some wealthy foundation will finance a complete edition of the correspondence of the best letter-writer among all English ...”

“... was very different, although economic expertise was no panacea for success: both Harold Wilson and Edward Heath were far more aware of the economic problems of their time than Eden was of those in his. Yet neither was able to do much to solve them. Eden’s life spanned the years between the heyday of Britain’s imperial grandeur and her decline, remarkably ...”

“... Straussians, as well as to such recent writers as Wolin, Bellah and Sandel. He stands with Popper, Berlin, Rawls and Dewey in his devotion to old-fashioned social-democratic liberalism. But he still calls himself a Marxist, and still believes that democratic hopes have been frustrated by the tendencies within capitalism which embody ‘the hegemony of ...”

“... conditions of today’s art, ‘rather there are countless individuals in Tokyo, New York, Berlin, London, Milan and other world cities communicating and competing with each other, just as they are in the banking world’. Out of their kaleidoscopic creations, it was to be hoped, might emerge ‘a shared symbolic order of the kind that a religion ...”

“... within months of each other in 1917; finally her unheroic, musical, stubborn little brother, Edward, was shot in the hills above Vicenza in June 1918. Brittain also returned to Oxford in 1919, ‘a ghost too dazed to feel the full fury of her own resentment’ as she put it. She found herself plagued by the illusion of a witch’s beard sprouting on her ...”