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“... Thomas Mann’s​ most noteworthy appearance in Irish letters until now came in one of the last poems of W.B. Yeats. In the spring of 1938 the poet read a piece in the Yale Review by Archibald MacLeish, the only article on his work ‘which has not bored me for years’ – a disarming piece of Yeatsian egotism since most of the article was not about him ...”

“... novelist. As judicious (though not hopelessly balanced) accounts, the new biographies by Gordon Bowker and D.J. Taylor confirm what the law of averages might have led one to suspect: some of this is true, some of it questionable and the rest of it false. (Scott Lucas, by contrast, thinks almost all of it true.) Orwell was indeed ...”

“... a beginning to a tragedy. If any couple bore out that maxim it was Annabella Milbanke and George Gordon Byron. The ‘happy’ chapter lasted barely 24 hours, the ‘ever after’ is with us still. Even the clergyman who performed the service was soon disillusioned. The Rev. Thomas Noel had been promised some ...”

“... and a former Baptist, was a wealthy London tobacconist, who left his wife £1685, a small fortune. Thomas Tomkinson, the leader of the second generation, came from a substantial family of Staffordshire tenant-farmers. Big money came into play in the 19th century with the Frost brothers, prosperous brass founders from Derby. But later in the century the sect ...”

“... as any other old Etonian from Somersetshire. The text of the leaflet is reprinted in Hugh Thomas’s biography of Strachey published twenty years ago. Thomas told us much more about Strachey the man (cricket, tennis, adoring family, etc) than about Strachey the socialist. This is perhaps because ...”

“... relics of both left and right, tattered copies of Milton Friedman and Hayek, Blairite posters and Gordon Brown speeches. On top, some combination of a cross and a hammer and sickle could be suitably laid. Another alternative would be to admit that Benjamin’s ‘continuum’ was an illusion. No revived programme or relentless campaign can possibly restore ...”

“... century. McKay’s Bees is a strange book, hardly a novel in any ordinary sense. The year is 1855. Gordon McKay in Boston has been inspired to wild enthusiasm by a newly published book about bees, their industry, fertility and the profits to be made from them. With his wife and brother-in-law he sets out to travel up the Mississippi to Kansas, there to found a ...”

“... the least worst choice from a pack of bizarre characters seemingly drawn from reality TV shows or Thomas Pynchon novels, but he’s not finding much love, even at his own coronation. Only 27 per cent of Americans think that he’s a ‘likeable’ guy. (Obama gets 61 per cent.) On television he projects a strange combination of self-satisfaction and an ...”

“... his juicy prospectus – seems a pity. Instead, we must make do, at least for the time being, with Thomas Underwood’s immensely detailed and tirelessly literary investigation of Tate’s early career, which culminated with Tate, at almost forty, on the brink of an eventful if largely uncreative middle age: a middle age in which the poet maybe tried to ...”

“... that trend cannot yet be judged, it is likely to gather strength from the important books in which Thomas Mayer and Alistair Fox examine the literature and politics of early Tudor England, especially of the reign of Henry VIII. Mayer’s concern is the literature of political theory. His study examines the ideas of ...”

“... in 1902 into a relatively prosperous middle-class family; his father was a bank inspector. Like Thomas Lovell Beddoes, an earlier oddball of British poetry, he was sent to Charterhouse School; he can’t have enjoyed it much, for when he was 16 he ran away to London, naively hoping to establish himself as a journalist. This bid for independence lasted all ...”

“... is a slippery enterprise. At the end of his immensely readable and often puckish exploration, Thomas Dixon sighs, with reason, that ‘it is impossible to pin tears down.’ Dixon directs the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London. Keats might have thought this rather like a Department for Unweaving the Rainbow. Dixon is ...”

“... East Coast filmmakers hurried West to seek maximum sunlight and maximum separation from Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company, which demanded copyright payment or else a bullet in the expensive newfangled movie cameras. The canyons and ravines of the Hollywood Hills were the natural redoubts against the Patents Company ...”

“... real: Lord Melchett (Morgan’s 19-year-old buddy), Lord Astor and his bride, Lord and Lady Duff Gordon, a Frick, a Vanderbilt, Mr and Mrs Straus who own Macy’s, and also Thomas Andrews, the architect of the Titanic, and Bruce Ismay, a White Star official. Real or fictional, they divide roughly into a group of young ...”

“... the dance of Loïe Fuller as taken up by Mallarmé and others, the theatre as reimagined by Edward Gordon Craig and Adolphe Appia, the applied arts as practised by Emile Gallé and championed by Roger Marx, the sculpture of Rodin as understood by Rilke, the different cinemas of Chaplin and Vertov, and the photography of the Stieglitz circle. In each instance ...”