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“... was published in 1922 in the collection Tristia. When it was reprinted in 1928, however, the poet took out both references to the ‘Soviet night’, and revised the poem in the interests of discretion and concealment. The Soviet night was indeed about to descend. It is difficult to overemphasise both the gravity and the simplicity entailed on Mandelstam’s ...”

“... seemed as if hermetically sealed, so relentless is their focus on who was in the room and what took place there. He specialises in what might be called bureaucratic procedurals, in which deep background reporting builds up a picture of momentous decisions emerging out of the accumulations of small amounts of power in a complex machine. But it has always ...”

“... Paddy Dignam, someone who never lived, then exit by torchlight to re-stage his burial, which never took place. In Dublin, as has been the custom for some years, perhaps a hundred will go to the cemetery where Dignam wasn’t buried, there to re-stage the same funeral, which never took place. A man in a brown mackintosh will ...”

“... Walker Evans, James M. Cain, Nunnally Johnson, S.J. Perelman, Dawn Powell, Joseph Mitchell and John O’Hara. Many of these celebrated figures, artists and authors approaching fifty at the start of the decade or only lately past it, grew up in small provincial towns, emigrated to New York in the Jazz Age and worked together in the city rooms of the Herald ...”

“... her relations with him would have a respectable front. Annabella wanted to reform him. His friend John Cam Hobhouse made strenuous efforts to stop the whole thing, while the Milbankes merely wanted their daughter settled. Thus the company assembled for the muted wedding ceremony at Seaham Hall on 2 January 1815 came with incompatible hopes and ...”

“... story, Pynchon captures a broader truth about Tesla and his influence. Between 1888 and 1905 Tesla took the idea of passing electric currents through coils of wire and – in service, he later claimed, of an enduring vision of transmitting power wirelessly around the world – invented or anticipated many of the technologies on which modern life ...”

“... guinea pigs. In 1822, the illiterate young French-Canadian was working as a ‘voyageur’ for John Jacob Astor’s fur-trading company in northern Michigan. He was hanging out with a bunch of rowdies in the company store when a shotgun accidentally went off and he was hit below his left nipple. The injury was serious and likely to be fatal – his ...”

“... Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell united in their distaste for the robust feminist arguments of John Stuart Mill. ‘In short, J.S. Mill’s head is, I dare say, very good, but I feel disposed to scorn his heart,’ sniffed Charlotte in a letter to Elizabeth Gaskell. ‘Woman must obey,’ Christina Rossetti wrote in 1879. ‘Her office is to be man’s ...”

“... in the race for Labour’s deputy leadership against the candidate supported by the Tribune Group, John Prescott? Right again. Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. In The Candidate, the great American film about political compromise starring Robert Redford, a young welfare lawyer is persuaded against his instinct to go into politics to change the world. He starts by ...”

“... of their civil rights in order to spare the family from ruin or infamy. One noted alienist, John Haslam, hinted at an affinity between respect for property and sanity, insinuating that a disregard for or neglect of property was evidence of a delusional state. Asked whether miserly habits indicated unsoundness of mind, Haslam replied: ‘If those miserly ...”

“... he ran away three times in one week from the school to which an Essex County boarding scholarship took him. He managed to do well enough in his A-levels to get into Leeds University to read law, where he got a predictably disappointing degree. Both his parents were, in different ways, politically committed and Straw as boy and student had intense political ...”

“... Both here and in his earlier study of the Edinburgh Review and his first volume on Macaulay, John Clive shows no desire to use or manipulate the Victorians. He merely wants to understand them better. And what he comes to understand, as G.M. Young did before him, is that the Victorian resolutely refuses to behave in the way we think Victorians ...”

“... already ireful coloured persons gets to hear the ITV soundtrack on which the following exchange took place. Commentator: ‘The Cameroon goalkeeper learned his trade from the great German, Sepp Meier, and that is why he wears those black track-suit trousers. Meier gave them to him.’ Expert (chuckling): ‘I didn’t realise he was wearing track-suit ...”

“... any other audience’. Thus it defied Reith’s doctrine of a BBC-unified culture, and Sir John was heard to protest. For less exalted reasons, it also irritated most of the press. But for a time it survived the traumas of its birth, and under George Barnes and Harman Grisewood there was a reasonably permissive, though it would now also be called an ...”

“... a quivering graduate student at Oxford in 1973, fresh from the Northern provinces, I sat for the John Locke Prize, a voluntary two-day examination for Oxford postgraduates in philosophy. As I had hitherto been a psychology student at Manchester, I thought this would be good practice for my upcoming B.Phil. philosophy exams. It was quite an ordeal (I nearly ...”