“... thing. I was just screaming. Listen to “a wop bop a loo bop a wop bam boom”’ – a Little Richard vocal line (garbled) from ‘Tutti Frutti’. ‘Don’t get the therapy confused with the music.’ And what’s true (and ‘simple’ and ‘real’) of the voice is also true of the instrument: How do you rate yourself as a guitarist? Well, it ...”

“... of ‘contemporary art’: Nicholas Serota (at the Tate), Charles Saatchi, Sarah Kent (Time Out), Richard Dorment (Daily Telegraph, oddly enough). Against: Modern Painters, Brian Sewell (Evening Standard), Giles Auty (Spectator), Glynn Williams (at the RCA) and any number of Johnsonian or Waugh-like commentators who throw themselves into the breach on wet ...”

“... out in a group of ambitious black male writers who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s and included Richard Wright (born 1908), Ralph Ellison (1914) and James Baldwin (1924), Himes has never quite entered the pantheon. His peers were condescending: Wright never took him seriously as an artist; Ellison, who saw him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked ...”

“... for other ways out: the culture here is excursionary, touching on far more than the merely ‘English’. There is a good familiarity with American poetry, tending out of Objectivism, through Black Mountain, Beat, the ‘New York school’ and on, much later, to the more detached experimentalism of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers whose notion of ...”

“... or ‘servile’). The opening cry is almost as much a problem. How can ‘Debout!’ go into English (‘Arise!’ is dreadful)? It wasn’t until Socialist Songs in Chicago in 1900 that ‘ye wretched of the earth’ was hit on as an equivalent to ‘les damnés de la terre’ – the ‘ye’ too familiar, maybe, but ‘wretched’ a great leap. (I ...”

“... trial, massacre, impoverishment and exile. All for him to join the dictators’ club? For Wales, Richard, for Wales? Arafat’s father, Abdel Raouf al-Qudwa al-Husseini, brought his children up with the illusion that he would win title to stolen ancestral property in Egypt. In pursuit of the elusive inheritance, Abdel Raouf, a mild man in a fez with oversize ...”

“... an Irishman’s unconscious equation of Ireland with a virgin and thus of the six counties with an English penis). Why should we suppose that Jones was any less idiotic when he left the public domain? Hopkins deplores criticism like Popper’s which uses invented examples, and asks us to consider ‘such real and testing examples of behaviour as are provided ...”

“... argument, as there are, however, in recent alternatives to it. In his Shelley: The Pursuit (1974) Richard Holmes decided that both Claire and Elise had been pregnant by Shelley, that Claire’s pregnancy had aborted, and Elena was Elise’s baby. Claire Tomalin, in Shelley and His World (1980) argued more reasonably that the child was Claire’s; and in a ...”

“... and their shadows crossing and concealing each other at startling angles and with enticing effect. Richard Symonds, a couple of decades after Caravaggio’s death, wrote of the Cupid that ‘’twas the body & face of his owne boy or servant that laid with him’ and that his name was ‘Checco’ (that is, Cecco). Robb commends the boy for supplying his hero ...”

“... more to those discussed here – as are the movies and documentaries, with Albert Finney following Richard Burton and Robert Hardy as a screen Churchill. As for approval ratings, in an admittedly contrived phone-poll BBC2 viewers last November voted him the greatest Briton of all time. Most Churchill biographies have been massive: Roy Jenkins’s weighed in at ...”

“... millions can never be comprehended by a single person.’ They also typify the difference between English and French intellectual approaches. The very title of Robb’s Parisians announces that it is going to be based on people rather than thesis or theory; while its craftily alluring subtitle ‘An Adventure History of Paris’ seems to hint at Jules Verne ...”

“... of his peers. Partly it’s the distinction – far more rigidly observed in Germany than in the English-speaking world – between serious and popular (e and u in German parlance, Ernst and Unterhaltung), but there’s more to it than that.There is something touchingly wrong about Zweig. He had a trammelled life and preached freedom; he gave himself to ...”

“... that inequality means bad outcomes are being distributed across the social scale, making even rich English parents more vulnerable than poor Swedish ones. This sounds like a knock-down political argument: more equality would give rich people in unequal societies the kind of life chances that even poor people enjoy elsewhere. Who could object to that? It needs ...”

“... fall’, and she was not alone in finding in him an innocence of the world that lay about him.As Richard Holmes’s 1974 biography showed with such intelligence and affection, Shelley was fully aware of his reputation for being away with the fairies and became brilliantly adept at playing along with it, often to seductive effect; but it wasn’t just an ...”

“... British voyage to the South Seas returned with a striking Ra’iātean called Mai (known to the English as ‘Omai’). Banks introduced him to London society, and he soon became a must-see metropolitan attraction. Joshua Reynolds painted his portrait and William Parry did an ensemble piece of Mai, Solander and Banks. Mai met the king, Dr Johnson and Fanny ...”