“... to ‘British and Irish Authors’, a high-quality series which includes Patrick Parrinder on James Joyce and John Batchelor on H.G. Wells. Barnard gets a great deal into his short book, presenting a rather different Keats from that of the many other Keats scholars and biographers. Keats’s vividness has been present to his admirers in many forms. In ...”

“... its correspondence columns: this time with its refusal to print Wynne Godley’s refutation of William Rees-Mogg’s claim that the British economy has outperformed the Japanese by 75 per cent over the last decade.) The Book War with the Times was a great test for the NBA and clinching proof that, this time, the agreement would hold. The publishers won ...”

“... tendency to think in terms of dramatic absolutes. A crude version of this argument can be found in William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a relentless piece of Nazi pedigree-hunting with some claim to be considered, despite strong competition, the worst book ever written on German history. Others have argued more subtly for the role played by ...”

“... he was the sixth most caricatured individual in Britain; and only three other politicians, William Pitt the Younger, Charles James Fox and North, featured in prints more. Yet, as Robinson points out, before 1778 visual representations of Burke were rare: and this is suggestive. In retrospect, Burke’s speeches in ...”

“... merchants and clerics of Genoa or Antwerp. In his catalogue essay, Malcolm Rogers quotes William Sanderson, his near-contemporary, as saying that Van Dyck was the first painter that ‘e’er put ladies’ dress into a careless romance’, and goes on to quote Herrick’s ‘Whenas in silks my Julia Goes’. As well as ease and sweet disorder there ...”

“... begin a letter to a woman with an Italian name ‘Dear Dago’, while the state’s other senator, James Eastland, would not only glare at New York’s Jewish senator, Jacob Javits, and say things like ‘I don’t like you or your kind’ but actually proposed that Congress limit the number of Jews conducting interstate businesses because ten thousand Jewish ...”

“... for which Enwezor curated the African section, featuring Bouabré, Kendell Geers and William Kentridge, a painter and animated film-maker from Johannesburg – a kind of expressionistic Lotte Reiniger – working, in the film shown in Kassel, with shadow-puppets and a voice-over evoking both the Great War and the Freudian couch.In 2001, Enwezor ...”

“... first undergraduate publication in the Cherwell gave his name as MacPiece, suggestive of William Makepeace Thackeray, an author not without Irish connections of his own. The entry on MacNeice here is another tour de force of Muldoonian free association, again revolving around ‘The Dead’. The character Malins suggests Malin Head in Donegal, from ...”

“... reason, it does not allure or corrupt.’ It was partly such self-justifications that provoked James Thomson’s judgment on Bulwer-Lytton in 1874: ‘he was one of the most thorough and hollow humbugs of the age; false and flashy in everything; with pinchbeck poetry, pinchbeck learning, pinchbeck sentiment; stealing whatever good things he could lay his ...”

“... winter of discontent. Still, it was a much better piece than was generally allowed (Clive James and Richard Ingrams making particular fools of themselves) but it wasn’t what viewers had come to expect from me and so was unfamiliar, or too unfamiliar anyway, a little unfamiliarity often an ingredient of success at any rate with critics, as it enables ...”

“... enthusiasm for Patton: Lust for Glory that would seem to have had world-historical consequences. William Rogers, then secretary of state, called the president a ‘walking ad’ for the movie. The White House chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, advised his young aides to see the film to get a handle on Nixon’s mindset. Kissinger saw it as a sign that he had ...”

“... dramatically reduced Indian populations and changed the physical environment. It created what James Merrell called ‘the Indian’s New World’, a world as changed and daunting for Indian peoples as it was for Europeans. For Richter, as for Merrell, Indians are as much a people of history as Europeans and Africans are; they find themselves in the middle ...”

“... this is precisely the reason they cannot be pineapples. The most they can do is create what Henry James called the ‘air of reality’ of pineapples. In this sense, all realist art is a kind of con trick – a fact that is most obvious when the artist includes details that are redundant to the narrative (the precise tint and curve of a moustache, let us ...”

“... the accused. As if to show what a bad idea it was to annoy the state, the wholly apolitical James Kantor was held in detention as an act of revenge for his (highly political) brother-in-law’s escape from jail. Above all there was Percy Yutar, the deputy attorney-general of the Transvaal and the state prosecutor. Yutar, the regime’s ...”

“... at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan,’ Admiral William Leahy, wartime chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in his 1950 memoir. ‘The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.’ Eisenhower later said it had been his belief at the time ‘that Japan was already defeated and that dropping ...”