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“... Words upon the Window-Pane, come up with the names of Hugh Kenner, Denis Donoghue, Geoffrey Hill, Robert M. Adams, Michael Foot, Norman Brown, J. Middleton Murry, George Orwell, André Breton, F.R. Leavis. Said’s overlooking of most (not all) of these might strike you as a shade provincial, but they aren’t much to his ...”

“... which I had mistakenly supposed to be in honour of a thoroughgoing Tory figure. The first is by Robert Blake, himself an almost official Tory historian. Once more, ‘the missing telegrams’ concerning Chamberlain’s pre-knowledge of the Jameson Raid are displayed and the answer is decisive: Chamberlain knew and persistently deceived the House of ...”

“... According to one early theory, the reason some of the murder sites were close to branches of Michael’s, the craft-store chain, was that the shooter wished to be thought of as the Archangel Michael, expecting the cowed populace to recall the name’s meaning (‘who is like God’) and to realise the end was nigh. The ...”

“... Swedish documents), Dame Veronica’s account of the war was scarcely challenged for a generation. Robert Ergang’s The Myth of the All-Destructive Fury of the Thirty Years’ War (1956) concentrated on the exaggerated accounts of its economic consequences. S.H. Steinberg’s The ‘Thirty Years’ War ‘and the Conflict for European Hegemony (1967), a ...”

“... left. Ray Liotta, looking young and spruce but tired, is at the wheel, his face well lit. Robert de Niro, in the passenger seat, is asleep. Joe Pesci, in the back seat, is nodding off. A thumping noise is heard, and Liotta says, ‘Jimmy.’ De Niro wakes up. Liotta continues: ‘Did I hear somethin’?’ Cut to a side view of the rear of the ...”

“... The writing is genuinely alive with what Connolly called ‘erotic nostalgia’. Both Powell and Michael Shelden emphasise his capacity for self-inspection, elevated to a comic art, on the subject of his own tastes and weaknesses (‘MESSAGE FROM THE ID: “If you would collect women instead of books I think I could help you” ’), and the acceptance of a ...”

“... where he had been unable to do anything for the wounded. He is introduced and translated here by Michael Hamburger, who gives the German originals, including the last two war poems, ‘In the East’ and ‘Grodek’. Grodek was the place at the front where Trakl had his traumatic experience, but this last poem is somehow not adequate to its nature, any more ...”

“... respond to events that took place centuries ago but continue to reverberate? The cultural critic Michael Rothberg proposes the term ‘implicated subject’, something more than ‘bystander’ and more complicated than ‘beneficiary’. No one alive now whose family received wealth from slavery can be considered guilty. But that doesn’t mean, in ...”

“... Frye celebrated the literary rediscovery of Scripture in The Great Code, and now Frank Kermode and Robert Alter, two critics who have given a new rigour and seriousness to the ‘Bible as literature’ movement, have brought together a constellation of literary and Biblical specialists, from both sides of the Atlantic, to explain the Bible from a literary ...”

“... include any architectural drawings has deprived viewers of a chance to admire even one of Joseph Michael Gandy’s amazing compositions of imaginary buildings, which must rank among the most spectacular exhibition watercolours that have ever been created. More surprising, perhaps, is the fact that Wilton and Lyles cannot bring themselves even to refer to any ...”

“... doe give most odorous smell,/but her sweet odour did them all excel.’None of this appears in Robert Muchembled’s Smells, whose lively account is much indebted to his compatriot Alain Corbin’s The Foul and the Fragrant (published in an English translation in 1986) and is almost entirely confined to the history of odours in France. He makes no ...”

“... three years of intensive negotiations, has slipped from the collective memory. This is odd. As Michael Cotey Morgan points out in his fascinating new book, it was a conference with grand objectives, most notably a final settlement of the Second World War, just as Vienna had forged a settlement after the Napoleonic Wars and Paris had tried to come to terms ...”

“... II – on the balcony of one, Hyman Roth slices up a birthday cake with a frosting map of Cuba as Michael Corleone and other Mob chieftains look on – or from the classic Soviet-era agitprop film I Am Cuba, in which rich Americans frolic around rooftop swimming-pools. Meantime, a few storeys below, a revolution looms. These relics are the hotels the Mob ...”

“... he rarely managed to earn the publisher’s advance. Yet his reputation never really declined. Robert Donat was keen to do The Polyglots as a film, but eventually decided that ‘only Hollywood or Alexander Korda could do justice to the story.’ Basil Dean, who had filmed The Constant Nymph, was enthusiastic as well, but that too came to nothing. Dr ...”

“... of the British Empire against three major powers in three different theatres of war.’ Sir Robert Vansittart, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, had put the same point more succinctly three years earlier: ‘We are greatly overlanded.’ We now have ample evidence that, in the 1930s, ministers and their service advisers were more and more ...”