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“... metaphysical passage, a long poem every bit as wonderstruck and worshipful as John Dee and Edward Kelley when they scried their obsidian mirror, seeking to speak with angels. It begins, ‘Angels hovering all round,’ and then scatters, across nine pages, verses like fluttering cherubim, invocations to each of them:Heiglot,The angel of ...”

“... is an important, consciously Marxist strand of British postwar playwriting – from John Arden and Edward Bond in the Fifties and Sixties to John McGrath and Howard Brenton in the Seventies and Eighties – which has sought to renew and develop the Brecht project as a whole. But just as there is hardly a line of dialogue in the post-Caretaker British theatre ...”

“... wanted grand writing – one thinks of Parry’s ‘I was glad’, written for the coronation of Edward VII in 1902 – there were composers good enough to provide it. There was a coming together from 1870 onwards of the music that was being written for Anglican services, the attitude of the authorities to it and the social standing of the composers ...”

“... police headquarters. ‘You can’t travel with books like this,’ the arresting officer said. It was less than three weeks after 9/11. He was told by another officer that he would probably be detained until at least after his flight had left.‘At this point,’ Ali writes in You Can’t Please All, his second volume of memoirs, ‘my patience ...”

“... uploaded Bradley Manning’s leaked data to a place where its subjects could read it, which is said to have played a role in the Arab Spring too. But the old, irreplaceable dance of democracy, which those digital media helped make happen, still took place between bodies in public. Indeed, the vitality of Occupy for its long season seemed in part to come ...”

“... closed his account. Hence the ‘age of Elizabeth’ appears to begin from 1547 with the reign of Edward VI. Such concessions to historical ‘tidiness’ (or are they concessions to the continuing draw of Elizabeth’s name?) are small matters. The author does not allow himself to be too closely confined by artificial boundary posts. The debate about the ...”

“... frequently during his professorial year in America in 1932-33 was not Browning, or even Dante, but Edward Lear. Lear’s genius for names – from the Quangle Wangle to the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò – had captivated Eliot from childhood, and he had imitated Lear in his pencil-written magazine of 1899, the Fireside. The ten-year-old Eliot had made up distinctive ...”

“... Holroyd has a lot of interesting things to say. Lee had a miraculous voice-training method and is said, though not very credibly, to have been one of the models for Du Maurier’s Svengali. He was a bit shady, a bit of a rogue – a type Shaw habitually fell for and habitually treated with great generosity. In conscious or unconscious emulation he liked to ...”

“... The Prince was walking up and down in silence. He caught me by the hands and said: ‘Oh! say there is surely not going to be “warr” (pronouncing it like “far”). Dear, dear Mrs Asquith, can we not stop it?’ (wringing his hands) … ‘I do not understand what has happened. What is it all about?’ Millions​ of people then and ever since have shared the bafflement and anguish of Prince Lichnowsky and have asked the same questions ...”

“... confesses to being in love with his sheep, Daisy: ‘It was the greatest lay I ever had!’ In Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (2000), the same premise plays out as family tragedy. The disclosure of the father’s goat-love – ‘a love of an … (dogmatic) un-i-mag-in-able kind’ – prompts both marital crisis and a frantic burst of ...”

“... of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In his first speech in his new position, Wheeler said: ‘I get frustrated with the media when they report I was a coal lobbyist.’)*It is revealed that President Trump told a visiting group of Spanish ministers that Spain should build a wall across the entire Sahara desert to keep out refugees.*Testifying ...”

“... the family next to us. ‘C’est le maréchal, il est mort, là-bas,’ the man of the family said, pointing to the horizon. Philippe Pétain died at 9.22 a.m. on 23 July 1951. He had been tried for treason in 1945, while General de Gaulle was still in his first spell of power. The hero of Verdun was sentenced to death by one vote, but the court asked for ...”

“... However peculiar we may find this remark, the method would certainly be justified if it indeed said anything very new or interesting about the novels or the novelist. But it doesn’t, and at first it isn’t easy to see what it provides instead, especially since it avoids gossip, or claims to. What then does it offer? The answer is that it offers lots of ...”

“... and detail. It is without any doubt a central historical document of the period it covers. That said, the apparently exhaustive accounts of issues and events are often crucially distorted by omissions and silences. Her rendition of the Westland affair makes almost no mention of the leaking of the Solicitor-General’s letter and the bogus ‘inquiry’ into ...”

“... mathematics, starved himself to death, believing his doctors were poisoning him. Dirac, who said, ‘I think it’s a peculiarity of myself that I like to play about with equations, just looking for beautiful mathematical relations which maybe don’t have any physical meaning at all,’ but correctly predicted the existence of anti-matter, was famous ...”