“... end of time, remain profoundly proud of the glorious achievements of the old British Empire.’ So said the Conservative politician Duncan Sandys in 1962. He added that he was equally proud of having converted the empire ‘peacefully and amicably into the new independent Commonwealth – a development without parallel in history’. At the time, many people ...”

“... you propose a man’s health on his 359th [it was actually the 361st] birthday,’ Shaw said, ‘you may be sure that … what his health requires is country air … But Stratford wants a new theatre. The Memorial is an admirable building, adapted for every conceivable purpose – except that of a theatre.’ Shaw’s fellow governors felt it ...”

“... 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 It is without any doubt a central historical document of the period it covers.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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... ran the message, for doing bad things to Liverpool. Perhaps the day will dawn when Liverpool is said to hate someone for doing bad things to Aberystwyth or Krasnoyarsk. But then again it’s almost certain that she did do bad things to Liverpool. Another LRB writer, Peter Pulzer, delivered a still resented cut at her reputation when he led the successful ...”

“... of time, and the failure of hope, will always tinge with a browner shade the evening of life.’ Edward Gibbon.1 August, Yorkshire. A couple of years ago we planted some lychnis coronaria by the back gate, and in our prolonged absence this summer it has seeded itself in the stone trough by the back door, with a lone outpost in a crack between the paving ...”

“... River (1941), described by his secretary as ‘so unlike him, so introspective’, the dying Sir Edward Leithen spends his last days saving indigenous Canadians in the name of ‘the brotherhood of all men, white and red and brown’. The Island of Sheep (1936) proposes a similar brotherhood between the angry African tribesmen who save the day in the ...”

“... a recitative setting of the speech from Cesare Morelli, an expatriate Italian composer. Edward Bysshe later anthologised it in his Art of English Poetry (1702), Anthony Ashley-Cooper praised it in his Characteristicks (1710), John Hughes discussed it in the Spectator (1712), Voltaire cited it in his Lettres philosophiques (1733), and in 1749 Robert ...”

“... to his penis as a ‘club’. ‘His club!’ one of them exclaimed. ‘Bunny’s club,’ said the other. This exchange, according to Mitchell, was ‘not unkind’; the women were amused because ‘they knew how unreliable a club could be.’ Adulterous affairs were commonplace well into the middle age of Sayre’s parents’ generation and ‘were ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... recited in British and American universities about what these three philosophers wanted, what they said, and where they went wrong. For the book offers an Anglo-Saxon audience features not previously found within a single volume. It is an insider’s book, in the sense that the young Habermas cut his philosophical teeth on Heidegger – just as the young ...”

“... further in a sepulchral world of its own. Even then, the couple’s only way was probably out: an Edward VIII-plus solution, with its terminal implications for the future of the institution. After September, can there be any doubt at all? There are still trusties like Vernon Bogdanor and Clive James who feel that ‘we’ cannot live without the ...”

“... renamed Gerusalemme conquistata emerged from these debates in 1593. The kindest thing that can be said about it is that it is the product of much effort and conscientious thought. Tasso was probably mad; he was certainly a bad reviser. But he was not Ariosto in corsets. His response to writing a poem which really could not be written was to create scenes of ...”

“... for details of the English dead at Agincourt. The herald hands over a paper, and the King reads: Edward, the Duke of York, the Earl of Suffolk, Sir Richard Ketly, Davy Gam, esquire; None else of name; and of all other men But five and twenty. The French have lost ten thousand, of whom all but sixteen hundred were persons of ‘blood and quality’. There is ...”

“... happy. I sit and listen to my own blood, or to someone’s blood. ‘I am no more your mother,’ said Sylvia Plath. ‘I am no more your mother than …’ As for Henrietta – I am pregnant. I cannot conclude. I am lodged at AltaVista 44, a site called ‘What Happens’: it’s the story, among other things, of her revenge. Everything on the Internet is ...”