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“... bolted Hollywood to run off with Roberto Rossellini, leaving her husband (a Swedish doctor), her young daughter and her place as the world’s most successful and virtuous film star. It couldn’t, could it? she pleads winsomely. Certainly many of the elements in the Bergman-Rossellini drama are as dated as the home permanent. The grande affaire, the world ...”

“... girls look less mad than trapped; they could be acting the part of one of Dickens’s wild, angry young women. Forbidden and shocking images proliferated. Pornographers found photography a lucrative medium (although there is nothing of that here), while social reformers made it a persuasive one. In Thomas Annan’s Close No. 118 High Street, from an album ...”

“... speech in the parliamentary debates on the second reading of the first Reform Bill was made by the young MP for the rotten Wiltshire borough of Calne, Thomas Babington Macaulay. He denounced the aristocracy’s blind insensitivity to the upper middle classes from which he came. He stressed the contribution that class could and should make to politics. It was ...”

“... Poland but then part of the Russian Empire. Her family moved to Kyiv when she was three and as a young woman she studied at the newly established Kyiv Art School, leaving after graduation in 1906 for Paris and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. Here she met Fernand Léger, who became an important friend and supporter, though she was criticised for her ...”

“... only one of his author’s novels was in print. And that one was the near-porno Sanctuary, about a young woman who was raped with a corncob, a cheap yarn which Faulkner, then in dire penury, had concocted to sell and which, one hopes to his annoyance, sold more than all his previous works. Today his entire canon is available but no volume that I have looked at ...”

“... 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 1.5 kilos and a ...”

“... had been available to workers and non-workers alike. He claimed that these benefits had encouraged young men to withdraw from the labour market, young women to become pregnant outside marriage and young fathers to decline to marry the mothers of their babies. In the black ghettos, ...”

“... Wyatt and Campion and Pope before it as certainly as, after it, it disregards Pound and the young Eliot. Such blank verse – the unrhymed, relentlessly regular pentameter – can be squeezed out like toothpaste, ignoring the audibie shape of any one verse-line or run of lines, because we are supposed to be attending to larger and more urgent ...”

“... becoming possible through the advances in the physical and chemical techniques of the 1930s. The young scientist was John Kendrew, one of many inspired by such conversations to win the Nobel Prize, which escaped his travel companion. But it might have been anyone, male or female, who ever came within earshot of that stumpy, bohemian visionary genius with the ...”

“... of mass destruction – didn’t appear for another 25 years. And on the day of the explosion Robert Peary’s crew were in New York, where they stayed for another week before embarking for Ellesmere Island. The biggest question, though, as Pynchon’s Professor Vanderjuice notes, is why on earth Tesla would have wanted to do such a thing: ‘Did Tesla ...”

“... the whole thing like a campaign advert directed by John Ford. In Milwaukee, I bumped into Robert Auth, a member of the New Jersey General Assembly, who began telling me and a Swedish journalist that the Republican Party had always been all about surviving and staying on course. ‘We’re shocked,’ he said, ‘but we’ll go about our ...”

“... Eric Lomax, as a young Royal Signals officer, had the misfortune to get caught up, with a third of a million others, in what has been called a ‘logistic imperative’, an enterprise more vulgarly known as the Death Railway, planned and carried through by the Japanese Imperial Army. At any point in history a logistic imperative is something to be avoided at all costs, whether it involves cutting the Americas in two or building St Petersburg in a freezing swamp ...”

“... And does national television grind to a halt at the sight of a senior citizen exploiting a bought young body? Are the South Bank Show phone lines clogged with complaints at the voyeuristic, objectifying camera lingering hungrily over a groin which, we must assume, has a mind attached to it? Do hundreds of enraged women – I mean, mothers – march against ...”

“... of violence. Collective violence became an integral element of the organised labour movement. Robert McKean’s study focuses on the years between 1907 and 1917, a crucial period in the rise of labour militancy, when workers concentrated their protest efforts on strikes, and the socialist parties competed among themselves for influence over the organised ...”

“... seriously incapacitated by an injured knee which defied the surgical skill even of the eminent Sir Robert Jones, was still obliged to cook the omelettes, since her husband would accept them from nobody else. Edward Garnett, Conrad’s literary adviser and intimate friend from early in his career, observed that his ‘ultra-nervous organisation appeared to make ...”