“... Catholic as well as an Ulster Unionist, an antisemite and an enthusiast for Mussolini. The only English writer to match Huysmans had been kicked out of the Scots College. Frederick Rolfe, who was from a family of Dissenting piano-makers and had developed a fascination with the Borgia popes, had been too strange for his classmates to handle. Although he ...”

“... doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’. In a letter of 1818 to his friend Richard Woodhouse, Keats describes it like this:When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me that, I am in a ...”

“... view. (‘You are sure to lose it,’ Harris told him. ‘You haven’t a dog’s chance and the English despise the beaten.’) Just then, however, Douglas arrived and berated Harris for his advice. When Douglas stormed out of the restaurant, Wilde followed, saying: ‘It is not friendly of you, Frank, it really is not friendly.’ He was not going to take ...”

“... for imminent invasion, the Dutch sailing up the Thames. Paranoia runs deep, it runs all through English literature, and it is often associated with the river. You arrive at a sensationalist hack like Sax Rohmer with his fear of the Chinese. He wrote a book called The Devil Doctor, published in 1916. Cover illustrations for cheap railway editions show Fu ...”

“... fiction of Elie Wiesel to George Steiner’s ruminations in In Bluebeard’s Castle and Richard Rubenstein’s The Cunning of History. But to insist on the uniqueness of the event is a short step to insisting on the exclusiveness of interpretation which asserts an empathetic privilege and even a Jewish proprietorship in the subject. Seven years ...”

“... significant way. And perhaps it wasn’t that new after all: there are examples of visual poems in English as early as the Elizabethan era, many of which he would have known. It’s less clear how well he knew Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897), or the work of Apollinaire, who by 1916 had almost finished his Calligrammes, perhaps ...”

“... of plumbing.) Raulff sees this story and De Quincey’s tale of near death at high speed in ‘The English Mail-Coach’ as prescient narratives in which the horse is both harbinger of and impediment to the modernisation of the countryside. Raulff’s cultural history is full of live horses and dead asses, in the road, in the mills and mines, and on the ...”

“... night after night, and doing all those unspeakable things to her, was me.’ Marguerite’s boss, Richard Knox, has also been sleeping with Isobel, while the footnotes in After Absalon conclude with the revelation that Harold, discovered rootling through a wheelie bin, is alive and well. While the footnotes supply one ending, the main narrative leaves us with ...”

“... on a Soviet jet Khrushchev offered him. ‘You took away our planes,’ Castro explained in broken English to the assembled press. ‘The Soviets gave us planes … The American people is good people. The Harlem people is wonderful people. You the reporters are wonderful. But you are not the owners.’‘We have driven Cuba inch by inch into alliance with the ...”

“... sources: Teutons, Anglo-Saxons, Celts and even the Belgians. But things could get tangled. Richard Verstegan’s A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities concerning the Most Noble and Renowned English Nation (1605) asserted that the Irish tongue was originally German, and was spoken by Adam and ...”

“... the array of detail proves his point: ‘shipwrecks real, mythical and metaphorical were part of English cultural consciousness’ between the 16th and 18th centuries.They were certainly a favourite motif of early modern writing: the timbers of Renaissance imaginations creaked under the weight of analogy. The soul was a ship, and temptations would wreck ...”

“... the paving stones? Architecture will get it sorted. As Reinier de Graaf noted of a speech by Richard Rogers: ‘With each new sentence a new location, topic or domain is added to the theoretical competence of architecture.’Denise Scott Brown, overlooked co-author of the ham-fisted National Gallery extension (with her much praised husband, Robert ...”

“... to release these documents. This is rather like writing about the Watergate scandal and applauding Richard Nixon’s forthrightness in finally handing over the White House tapes. If the citizens of Hanford are unable to accept what really happened there it wouldn’t be unusual. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Françoise Zonabend’s The Nuclear ...”

“... very level-headed on this question: he notes the mistakes made on both sides, some of which – as Richard Neustadt was the first to point out in his 1970 study Alliance Politics – actually arose from the intimate nature of the exchanges between the two governments and the false conclusions which this assumed intimacy was liable sometimes to promote. But he ...”

“... drawn into the company of the so-called Real Whigs, dissenting intellectuals like Thomas Hollis, Richard Barron, Sylas Neville and Caleb Fleming. She also met and initially admired John Wilkes, whose radicalism took a far more activist form. It was – presumably – in discussions and arguments with men such as these that she hit upon the idea of ...”