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“... of Schiller’s Mannheim. In music as in the other arts his ‘questionable’ taste was a vital part of his own questioning of ‘taste’ and the hierarchies it stood for: but it was equally a part of his quest for the Utopian spirit in whatever guise it might appear. There was no condescension about his tributes to those forms of popular art and ...”

“... she said five words that chilled Joan to the bone: ‘What difference does it make?’ This is vital, as constant as the river and as terminal as the sentences, for it gets at the last worry, the greatest, that in all the wagons west and pioneering, in all the strenuous self-dramatisation of being American, maybe nothing matters, maybe there is no ...”

“... which he rightly saw as the precondition of great social transformations. Much earlier, another vital bit of modernity had been produced in the same country, in Gutenberg’s workshop in Mainz. As Benedict Anderson has pointed out, print was the precondition of all modern ‘imagined communities’. Now it would give rise to the most widely-read book of the ...”

“... powers of Ernest Bevin (‘his crowning achievement’, in the words of the new foreign secretary, David Lammy). Apps describes Bevin as ‘the man who would strike the initial spark that started Nato’ and who took the ‘first faltering steps’ towards its creation. But however long you pick over Bevin’s correspondence with George Marshall and Arthur ...”

“... of Citizen Kane. Welles’s own ‘presence in the picture’, Otis Ferguson wrote, ‘is always a vital thing, an object of fascination to the beholder. In fact, without him the picture would have fallen into all its various component pieces of effect, allusion and display. He is the big part and no one will say he is not worth it.’ The charm is made ...”

“... but as heroic underdogs. They were shown on television being shot and beaten by Israeli soldiers. David the good guy was now a Palestinian, and nasty Goliath an Israeli. The women and the old joined in to support the uprising, and all were soon aware that the use of stones rather than guns was their strongest political card in the ...”

“... were either soured by authorial complaints against Olwyn Hughes, Ted Hughes and the Estate (e.g. David Holbrook, Edward Butscher) or have come to nothing (e.g. Lois Ames, Harriet Rosenstein). Most of the book-length literary criticism is unimpressive. There isn’t much to choose, for example, between Margaret Dickie Uroff (‘As they developed, Plath came ...”

“... from cryptographic quality-checker to admired chef de codage of a vastly expanded, efficient and vital SOE unit which by the end of the war had handled some forty million messages from agents in the field. Between Silk and Cyanide is his account (or as much of it as was allowed by the Official Secrete Act) of how he did it, of how, with him leading from ...”

“... dividing idiocies and employ our energies directly, as best we can, on the actual material of the vital inheritance that unites us and divides us.’ The Gaelic poet he commemorates is Padraigin Haicead (1600-1654), and he provides a translation of a tribute from Haicead to a harper which might serve as an epigraph for the whole volume: Blessings on your ...”

“... relationship between these two elemental figures of the Russian revolution was intricate and vital, as only a great novelist might have conceived it.’ What a challenge! I read on: ‘It began in polemic. In 1904 Trotsky, who had not yet broken with the Mensheviks, wrote of Lenin as a man “hideous” and “dissolute”.’ This was a revelation, a ...”

“... of Thomas Gray, Allen Ramsay and Oliver Goldsmith, casually mentions that he does not need to read David Hume on miracles, and obliquely compares his own work with that of Milton? There is a paradox here: the more Bewick strove to establish his credentials as an artist, the more apparent it becomes that he was not the bon sauvage he was portrayed to ...”

“... to entail unkindness. Impersonality of this sort is at odds with the assumption that the most vital connections are made when all the concerned parties open up, find what they have in common and come to be comfortable with each other. Such purging of distance and discomfort, according to Sennett, stops one recognising and responding to the autonomy of ...”

“... institutions and environments but – and here is the real tragedy – of everything most vital and beautiful in the modern world itself.’ The ten-year construction/ destruction of the Bronx was only the beginning of its long-term ruin. This story is repeated internationally. Donald Riche tell us that in Japan the growth of the automobile led to a ...”

“... off them, not fear of arrest, or of Isis or the CIA, but fear of losing a story or missing a vital exclusive. But MacAskill was not put off by Greenwald and Poitras’s protectionism and they went to Hong Kong in a posse. Compared to any other major leak in recent times, the material passed on was not only of the highest order but beautifully ...”

“... powerful man in the country and do their best to pretend he has some claim to be taken seriously (David Cameron reached the same plateau when his inability to remember how many houses he owned was allowed to fade into oblivion). With the result in the bag, the party handlers could safely let Kenny out of his pen for the final three-way debate. All in ...”