“... Owen’s poems into print in her magazine, Wheels. With Façade, devised in collaboration with William Walton and first produced in 1922, she invented something new, a kind of Symbolist/Futurist performance poetry. Like her appearance, indeed her entire life, Façade treads fearlessly the fine line between the sublime and the ridiculous. Greene seems to ...”

“... There have been a couple of valiant attempts to resuscitate Davies’s poetry, notably by James Reeves, whose Penguin anthology of Georgian poetry allots him more entries than it does Owen, Graves, Sassoon or Edward Thomas, and by Jonathan Barker, whose 1985 edition of the Selected Poems reprints more than a third of his 800 or so poems. But it was ...”

“... and his voice – once richly modulated, now trembly. In 1971 he agreed to act in The Old Boys by William Trevor at the Mermaid; the crew fitted him with an invisible prompter attached to an earpiece. At the first public performance the prompter malfunctioned, sending out a loud hissing, leaving both Redgrave and the audience in a state of high anxiety. The ...”

“... The allusion may even be a kind of apology for surviving into so great a success. By 1603, when James came to the throne, Shakespeare could have retired rich and honoured to his great house in Stratford. The work he had amassed around the turn of the century was formidably diverse and brilliant. History had grown in his hands from chaotic chronicle to the ...”

“... Sedition Act of 1798, which prohibited citizens from criticising the government, his son James Lyon reprinted the biography, omitting the bits about the Deists and Socinians to let the prophet’s life story stand as a critique of the abuse of power and the suppression of dissent – with Adams as the latest in the long line of Muhammads. ‘We have ...”

“... to think tanks. Leading the rightist rising were the conservative intellectuals in the orbit of William F. Buckley’s National Review and the zealous campus activists of Young Americans for Freedom (a group ultimately larger and far more influential than the much celebrated leftist Students for a Democratic Society), as well as members of the staunchly ...”

“... roller-skating than to art (it is hung, somewhat lazily, with a few giant works such as F-111 by James Rosenquist), but it will be divided up for future shows. It is on the fifth floor that Taniguchi scales the architecture down, proportions the galleries nicely, and allows the collection of the Painting and Sculpture Department (P&S) to take over. The ...”

“... world could know itself. He was, if reluctantly, an adornment to the Prussian court of Frederick William IV, and a willing favourite of Queen Victoria. Innumerable biographies of all sizes have been published since his death, and his life is legendary though not unduly eventful. Now we have it in the kind of detail few need. Larry Todd’s book, in the ...”

“... Nato for having bombed them. Statism has its devotees in the cloister as well as the torture-room. William Edmundson’s recent Three Anarchical Fallacies argues that anarchists are committed to thinking not only that there is no obligation on citizens to obey the state, but also that belief in the legitimacy of the state entails the existence of such an ...”

“... on the story’s ideological bent. In 1993, a book called The Ghost in the Little House by William Holtz was published, claiming that a close study of the manuscripts of the novels revealed them to have been ghostwritten by Rose Wilder Lane, not only Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter, but a novelist, too. ‘Holtz’s book,’ Spufford ...”

“... particularly nowadays, with so many slots on cheapo channels needing to be filled (witness James Corden and Matthew Horne of Gavin and Stacey fame, currently advertising Lesbian Vampire Killers on the bus shelters of Britain). Meyer, however, has a different answer. She says that Twilight came to her in ‘a very vivid dream’ on the night of 1 June ...”

“... several of which remain indispensable – Schlesinger was among the chief assemblers of the King James Version of American liberalism. His Cold War manual, The Vital Center, is one of the period’s shrewdest pieces of liberal propaganda. He effectively made the aspirationless politics of the 1950s look like a tough-minded creed that could sustain the ...”

“... to ‘behaviour’ and strong on obedience. Proprietary dog-food, appealingly humanised – James Spratt’s ‘Meal Fibrine Dog Cakes’, for example – was added to the household’s grocery-list. No longer just a man’s best friend or a lady’s toy, the dog was a member of the family. And if dogs were the children who never grew up, they also ...”

“... It began life as a dissertation written at Berkeley under the supervision of Thomas Laqueur and James Vernon, whose students have done so much to document the way neoliberalism shaped every aspect of British life – financial markets, town planning, culture, humanitarianism. (Sasson thanks Berkeley faculty and graduate students, and 52 ‘fellow travellers ...”

“... wine, Lacryma Christi. The experience brought out something reckless in even the most serious. William Hamilton, who did more than anyone to further vulcanology as an academic study, made the ascent during the 1767 eruption in the company of the art historian Johann Winckelmann. They were travelling with the Prussian ambassador to Vienna, who had written a ...”