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“... in 1099, the new Christian population inhabited only one-quarter of the city, and then sparsely. William of Tyre says that in the early years of the 12th century a man might live in the centre of Jerusalem and yet be too far from his neighbours to find help when thieves broke in. Sixty years later the whole Christian population of the kingdom amounted to ...”

“... Immediately Mère Ubu, his wife, urges her ‘dirty old man’, who has somehow become aide-de-camp to King Wenceslas of Poland, to seize the crown. Unlike Macbeth, Ubu needs no convincing, because he has no conscience: in Ubu cocu (‘cuckolded’), a sequel to the play, he even flushes a character named Conscience down the toilet. This Super-Id – Jarry ...”

“... it has always been suspected he didn’t do much more in Jordan than attend a students’ summer camp with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine before the real fighting started. He was the Venezuelan rich kid straight out of the Kensington crammer his mother sent him to – Carol Thatcher went there too. ‘He is not as clever as he thinks or ...”

“... J.M. Dent to illustrate a two-volume edition of Le Morte d’Arthur, conceived in the style of William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, enabled Beardsley to give up his deadly day job as an office clerk, only to find the quest for the Holy Grail almost as constraining. The endless knights and ladies bored him; something odder and darker was emerging from the ...”

“... all these and others, though clearly different, are unimaginable without Pound, early Eliot, William Carlos Williams and perhaps Wallace Stevens as forerunners. This is the main stream of modern American poetry. In England the picture is very different. Pound is grudgingly acknowledged, distrusted, kept at a distance. Eliot holds his place, but not the ...”

“... piece written by Davie as a very young Observer reporter. It incorporates Raymond, Beaverbrook’s camp valet who would stamp his foot and say, ‘Oh, we are being difficult today, Lord!’, the current mistress, Marie-Edmée Escarra, later dismissed for drink, and a lethargic, affable, fat Lord Rosebery. They talk newspapers – the Observer is a good ...”

“... to know which peril to invoke, which would pay off best. In 1893 the prolific literary adventurer, William le Queux (sometime Honorary Consul for San Marino), published The Great War England in 1897, in which a Franco-Russian army invaded Britain, and followed it in 1905 with The Invasion of 1910, this time with jack-booted Prussians as the aggressors. This ...”

“... Gothic novels, all resolutely supportive of the rights of women, appeared throughout the 1790s. William Beckford wrote the Orientally-inspired Vathek (1786) when he was 21. Like Horace Walpole, author of the pioneering Gothic extravaganza The Castle of Otranto (1764), Beckford combined an interest in literature with a determination to revive a Gothic style ...”

“... The guests include the composer Miklós Rózsa, two leading actors from Fedora (Marthe Keller and William Holden), and Al Pacino, who is visiting Keller, his girlfriend. The conversation turns to the curious absence of Nazis in postwar Germany, and one of the German guests remembers a line from Wilder’s film One, Two, Three. Asked what he did in the war, a ...”

“... information about life at Winchester, where Empson’s companions included Richard Crossman, William Hayter, John Sparrow and other future grandees. It was, as he later remarked, ‘a ripping education’, a first-class ticket for life. The next stop was Cambridge, by means of a scholarship to Magdalene. At this optimum moment of intellectual purity he ...”

“... She tells us how her brother was arrested several times, released, then finally sent in 1938 to a camp ‘without the right of correspondence’ – in other words, liquidated. After his first arrest, in 1919, the brother – by some legal oddity – could be visited only by her, because she was under ten. Why was he arrested? No reason. Perhaps because ...”

“... Here is a typical sentence: ‘The revived interest in the White House wiretaps also prompted William Sullivan, who was then in the midst of a power struggle with J. Edgar Hoover, to visit Robert Mardian, head of the Justice Department’s Internal Security Division, and warn him, as Mardian later testified, that Hoover could not be trusted and might try ...”

“... has a specific history in German Romanticism. It is a delusion which Peter Paret and especially William Vaughan are quite ready to take for reality, while Norman Stone’s own dreams about ‘the positive qualities of Hitler, his real achievements’ (thus Professor J.H. Plumb’s Introduction) aid and abet it: if Hitler was some sort of genius, he is part ...”

“... in the Eighties. Saunders’s account of Partisan and its editor, the insufferably pretentious William Phillips – in a chapter she calls ‘Cultural Nato’ – is devastating. Far from being independent, PR was on the CIA payroll via front organisations like the Farfield Foundation. Before that, it had been carried financially by none other than Henry ...”

“... as the war starts’ (September 1937); ‘We might as well pack our bags for the concentration camp’ (March 1938); ‘the concentration camp looms ahead’ (November 1938). And there is the fearful vision of Coming Up for Air (June 1939): ‘The bombs, the food-queues, the rubber truncheons, the barbed wire, the ...”