“... even cannibalism. The exact proportions of the blending are open to dispute, though few read Homer’s poem as an unadulterated onslaught on war or the heroic ethos. Logue’s imitation comes close to being that. It is naggingly satirical, like an Iliad rewritten by Thersites. Logue begins with the Trojans in the ascendant, with both Zeus (angered ...”

“... forecast the political power implicit in the atom. He wrote it partly because he could not bear to read other people’s thrillers and because, like Raymond Chandler, he recognised the potential in this branch of popular fiction. ‘He has knowledge; and he has speed,’ said the Observer of that book. ‘Melodrama ... trivialising effects ... cheating,’ he ...”

“... into the open. The opponent is Jan Kott, who wrote Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1967), and the Peter Brook production (1970) which dramatised his findings. I take my stand beside the other old buffers here. Kott is ridiculously indifferent to the letter of the play and labours to befoul its spirit. And yet the Victorian attitude to it also feels ...”

“... of paintings and drawings; Claudia Stumpf deals with the ‘Expedition into Sicily’ and Peter Funnell with the more general critical writings: A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus, An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (1805), and An Inquiry into the Symbolical Language of Ancient Art and Mythology (1818). Individually the chapters are ...”

“... Produced to accompany an exhibition in Essen, the book includes detailed catalogue entries which read well in their own right (although it is a pity that A.C. Pugin’s date of birth is wrong throughout). The first part of the book, which comprises a series of essays on subjects including painting, collecting, literature, science and economics, as they ...”

“... the factualists are mistaken both about what historians should do and what they actually do. If I read my colleagues correctly, they are continually, and properly, testing stories about what might have happened in order to figure out what did happen. To argue why the Han empire collapsed, why European populations contracted in the 14th century, why World War ...”

“... directly and continuously with the implications of Pound’s poetics. The Maximus Poems can he read as a massive attempt to heal what Olson saw as the fatal self-contradiction that fissures The Cantos: how, Olson ponders, could Pound be ‘in language and form as forward, as much the revolutionist as Lenin’, while in political, social and economic ...”

“... grandparents in the wicked town of Maidenhead. I didn’t know it was wicked until later when I read the novels of Graham Greene and Patrick Hamilton. My aunt certainly wasn’t wicked. When she stepped out of the house she would usually go, not down into the town itself, but in the other direction up to what were called ‘the fields’ and on to ...”

“... In his letters he spoke copiously and freely to a great many correspondents. It is hard to read the dozens of amorous effusions here quoted without some distaste. The language of love is tediously extravagant, and often deserves the criticism Monk applies to Russell’s attempts at imaginative writing: ‘weak and affected’. Moreover, though he ...”

“... of the dialectical interplay of war and of its paradoxical logic. Memo to aspiring strategists: read the Portal-WSC exchange of memoranda word by word. The platoon also has a section of biographers, with Robert Rhodes James, of C: A Study in Failure 1900-1939 and Lord Randolph Churchill, here present in a chatty round-up that is mere fluff; Paul ...”

“... Brussels itself. Hungarian highways, built with EU money, were dotted with billboards that read ‘Let’s Stop Brussels’. Merkel’s Christian Democrats gestured at ‘red lines’ – and Orbán crossed them with impunity. He could do it because while talking the talk of anti-neoliberal populism – describing himself as a ‘plebeian’ in ...”

“... dispatches of the period. In February 1873, ladies in New York opened an issue of Harper’s to read an account of a sjambok whipping: ‘The cat crossed his shoulders until his large eyes were bloodshot … his hands working in agony; but he kept silence until the thirtieth time the lash descended, when, with a deep groan, full of the misery of physical ...”

“... however, the trend was in the opposite direction: the internal passport regime introduced by Peter the Great at the beginning of the 18th century was long retained as a regulator of movement. The Russian internal passport on the eve of the First World War identified its holders (men only) by title or rank, religion, marital status and liability for ...”

“... The Time by the Sea: Aldeburgh 1955-58, an account of years spent with Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears and E.M. Forster on the east coast.) ‘I see by a handbill in the grocer’s shop that a man is going to lecture on the Gorilla in a few weeks,’ said Edward FitzGerald, who lived near Woodbridge. ‘So there is something to look forward ...”

“... was not saved by friendships or by having any single outstanding ability. At Cambridge, where he read archaeology and anthropology before switching to history, and got a 2:2, his adviser, Rab Butler, told an early biographer that the prince was ‘talented – which is a different word from clever, and a different word from bright’. So, not bright and not ...”