“... 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 ...”

“... hero-worshipped Ronald Reagan. In his closing sentences this entrepreneur speaks of buying up some English newspapers in order to put me, and others like me, out of a job. I had a brief cackle on the telephone with the Spectator’s then-editor and filed it away under ‘department of empty threats’. I had much the same reaction after meeting a British ...”

“... theory. Given this comparative framework, we can begin to ask new questions about the English reaction to Darwin. Surely the most pressing task is to look at the socialist response at home. We already have pointers. Malcolm Kottler in his essay shows that even Wallace (who studied in Mechanics Institutes and socialist Halls of Science), supposedly ...”

“... half still-life, half interior, on his dust-jacket. The treasure-house created by the miniaturist Richard Cosway at 20 Stratford Place, Oxford Street is a case in point. Wainwright cites the 1821 sale catalogue of this collection, but not Hazlitt’s recollection of its ‘specimens of art, antiquarianism, and vertu, jumbled all together in the richest ...”

“... is caught and let loose for the pleasure of chasing it down again. With every chorus Bob Dylan and Richard Manuel lift their voices and then abandon them, stranding their words right at the edge of a cliff, suspending the sound in dead silence until the next verse begins. It’s a stark, shuddering effect, the pleasure cut like a heater in a cheap hotel ...”

“... and work as separate units. At worst, they read like a cross between R.D. Laing’s case-notes and Richard Aldington’s Imagism. At best, they have a force and integrity which none of the other poets associated with the Review, and few poets since, have come close to matching. The problem, as Hamilton concedes in his preface, is that these 50 poems encompass ...”

“... is successfully air-brushed by an elegant Post-Modern presentation. Mitchell, who teaches English and art at Chicago University, and is an editor of Critical Inquiry (the Debrett’s of cultural and critical studies), emerges from this book as a kind of ‘Pomosaurus’ or perhaps even a ‘thesaurus’ (a creature nimble with multiple meanings). The ...”

“... not rejoice at the vict-ories of the Boers or grieve about their defeats, after all they kill the English soldiers too’. But he couldn’t help it: ‘I am glad when I read about the defeats of the British, it cheers my soul.’ Russian conservatives were pro-Boer not only for the usual nationalist, anti-British reasons but because they thought the Boers ...”

“... Beckett’s first French novel. The cognates Muldoon finds for Beckett’s name are Old Irish and English, becc and boc, which sound like characters from one of the late plays. He neglects Beckett’s French Huguenot background, which the author himself used as a source of onomastics in the matter of his name. At one point in Eleutheria a disgusted spectator ...”