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“... civil servant who felt that bureaucrats should learn to write like human beings. Sir Ernest Gowers’s Plain Words (1948) and The ABC of Plain Words (1951) jointly became The Complete Plain Words (1954), continuing happily into a second edition (1973) under the urbane guardianship of Sir Bruce Fraser; and here it is afresh, deftly revised, with ...”

“... for our Time, is justified. Professor Gay has been able to use a great deal more material than did Ernest Jones when he wrote his three-volume Life and Work (1954-1957). And as long as the guardians of Freud’s archives continue to exercise their censorship (which, now that scarcely any of the participants in this story are still alive, seems ...”

“... above all because it was not reducible to a set of personal or partisan opinions. Scientists may disagree with one another but, when they do, the appeal on both sides of the argument is to hard facts, and what a relief that was for a man as irascible as Flaubert, who had a serious problem with opinions which lacked the backing of the hard facts that ...”

“... Emancipation involves escape, but having got out of the Victorian prison, what then? The new world may seem wholly delightful, like Blake’s Beulah or Keats’s Chamber of Maiden Thought, or the land of sexual intercourse we entered in 1963, so why not stay in it for ever? Somewhere at the top of the forest a little boy and his bear will always be playing ...”

“... their consent, to the countries they came from.’Very nice: ‘with their consent’. And so to Ernest Hemingway, whose adventures recorded by the military historian Nicholas Reynolds may not admit such subtlety. Reynolds is a former curator of the CIA Museum in Washington. Reasonably, the museum is a bit cagey and I am ...”

“... William Faulkner. Hawks presided over them and made it clear that any allegiance to the novels by Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Chandler would be theoretical and polite, so long as the sweet, silly and allegedly dark stuff played. Some said these were films noirs, but screwball comedy was closer to the mark. Mann is perceptive, careful and experienced in ...”

“... now 41. He moved to London, where he scratched a living writing pieces, ‘and attempted’, in Ernest Gowers’s words, ‘to demonstrate what he had always maintained to be true – that a man ought to be able to live on £100 a year’. In 1903 he moved to Guernsey and began working with his brother Francis Fowler, to whom Modern English Usage is ...”

“... congratulated him for what he had said against the Jews in 1904. ‘What is your nation if I may ask?’ the Citizen inquires of Leopold Bloom, to be told: ‘Ireland. I was born here. Ireland.’ Once the Irish Free State was established and the island partitioned, the Jews in Northern Ireland remained affiliated to Jewish structures in Britain, while ...”

“... underlies all these cases. Killing human beings is part of ordinary business practice. Problems may arise only in the way we do it.Where are we when the mismanaged murder occurs? We are in Fairfax, Oklahoma, in the early 1920s. A newsreel has told us why we are here. This territory belongs to the Osage, a tribe of Indigenous Americans, and they have ...”

“... to verge on anarchy, with Gorbachev’s reforms in real danger of being overtaken by events. He may control the state, but does the state control society? From the outset people have asked whether Gorbachev and perestroika can succeed. Now the question is whether the USSR itself will survive, and pessimistic, even apocalyptic answers are suddenly in ...”

“... elsewhere, on another stage. The patient’s story is all we have, and Freud’s attention may float but it never wavers. His transcript is exhaustive – it includes a map (itself confused) of the patient’s wanderings – but also constrained: the analyst must ‘suppress his curiosity’ so as to allow tale and teller to create their telltale ...”

“... the technical advances achieved by Wagner’s use of recurring motives in a dramatic context, and may thus even have assisted Wagner in the formulation of his mature musical style. Liszt himself, though he toyed with many operatic projects during the early 1850s, never managed to find the literary stimulus to react creatively to the challenge of musical ...”

“... Nearly forgotten today, Ernest Meissonier was the darling of the French Salon public during much of the 19th century. People flocked to see his meticulously executed, almost photographically precise, often very small pictures of battles, horses, landscapes, contemporary personalities and genre scenes; and even so forward-looking an observer as Delacroix thought Meissonier’s work as worthy to survive as anything then being produced ...”

“... Catherised’ was how Ernest Hemingway described the portrayal of the Great War in One of Ours by Willa Cather. Despite lifting scenes from the movie Birth of a Nation, it made Cather rich and won her the Pulitzer Prize. H.L. Mencken was as dismissive as Hemingway, finding in it a ‘lyrical nonsensicality’ that ‘often glows half pathetic’; its setting was that of ‘a Hollywood movielot ...”

“... On​ 7 May 1918, a man in Royal Flying Corps uniform presented himself at the gates of the Kremlin, claiming to be the personal emissary of the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, and demanding an audience with Lenin. He was persuasive enough to be let in and managed to talk his way as far as the chairman’s secretary, if not all the way to Lenin himself ...”