“... would later tell people that Lytton Strachey was wrong to say that Brooke had ‘bandy legs’; in Michael Holroyd’s biography James sides with his brother: ‘Rupert had bandy legs, all the same.’) This was, as Delany writes, the high summer of Neo-Paganism: Brooke read Paradise Lost to his admirers high in a chestnut tree; canoed down the river at ...”

“... confronts these contradictions. It acknowledges that the idea of a ‘meritocracy’ as coined by Michael Young had ‘downsides as well as upsides’, and that ‘others point out that social mobility cuts both ways – the more there is, the greater the likelihood is that, as some people climb up the social ladder, others fall down it.’ But the very next ...”

“... shaky start, it was the deus ex (hit) machina of MTV that was the key, as it was for Madonna and Michael Jackson. People of a certain age will never forget the lush, melodramatic promo for ‘Purple Rain’ and the cheeky, pared-down video for ‘Kiss’.2How did he get away with some of this stuff? Controversy came with a full-colour fold-out poster of ...”

“... everyone with their readiness. ‘A good lad, who was definitely up to it.’ Guardsman Gregory Shaw says they left camp at 10 p.m. Wakefield’s head and shoulders were protruding from the top of the second snatch, the usual position for a soldier doing top cover. ‘Everybody was fatigued,’ Shaw says. ‘You know ...”

“... The message was clear: young men would have to give up everything for Ireland. George Bernard Shaw later said that it was a play ‘which might lead a man to do something foolish’. Lennox Robinson wrote that it ‘made more rebels in Ireland than a thousand political speeches or a hundred reasoned books’.Now, at the end of his life, almost a version ...”

“... above all, the charmed, successful Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady (Maureen had certainly not read Shaw, for whom Colin evinced another of his hatreds). Nancy’s songs were very much a feature of Maureen’s repertoire, but with Eliza she had a daily complicity. Eliza’s songs, both before and after Higgins’s breakthrough, were forever on her lips. When ...”

“... plain. Outside Turkey, there has long been a school of historians, headed by the late Stanford Shaw, that reproduced the official mythology of the Turkish state, denying that anything remotely like genocide ever occurred on Ottoman soil. Bald negationism of this kind has lost academic standing. Later versions of this school prefer to minimise or ...”