“... acknowledge this. ‘The end of empire is not a pretty thing if examined too closely,’ as Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper put it in their two-volume history of Britain’s colonial wars in India and South-East Asia from the 1940s to 1963, which forms the perfect complement to Hyam’s work.* It was clearly not as pretty as that ‘great ship goes ...”

“... were photos depicting older men having power over younger ones and beating them with chains and so forth, or whether he meant something even more sinister and real’. Not much amazement left there.Purdy’s imagination drifts rather flatly towards the atrocious, and hideous events unfold in an atmosphere of lurid calm. Roy rapes Gareth on Brian’s ...”

“... the quotidian duties entailed by being a great power: embassies are run, cables go back and forth, visits, bilateral treaties, aid agreements are negotiated, and pronouncements are made. But the heavy boxing that characterised Reagan’s Middle Eastern policy from its beginning until roughly the midde of 1984 – a period that included the return of the ...”

“... that would be essential to dramatic invention. By contrast with university-educated rivals like Christopher Marlowe and John Marston, or the erudite autodidact Ben Jonson, Shakespeare owed most of his classical knowledge to his education in a provincial grammar school; but, in spite of Jonson’s condescending reference to his ‘small Latin and less ...”

“... rare direct comment on dress, but since the novel is a parody the remark is ironic, as defined by Christopher Ricks, in that it is both true and not true to the same extent at the same time. ‘Woman is fine for her satisfaction alone,’ Austen writes. ‘No man will admire her the more, no woman will like her the better for it.’ In parody the text works ...”

“... Nikki in some fairly literate erotic role-play (known in the community as ERP), chatting back and forth in interactive sex scenes that feel like a choose-your-own Fifty Shades of Grey. Given the nature of AI systems, though, these scenarios are flimsy: most apps seem to be using off-the-shelf language models with a wide-ranging but shallow capacity for ...”

“... merely a literary sensibility but a governing creed. For the Augustinian philosopher of history Christopher Dawson, fascism and liberal democracy were just two varieties of the fallen state.Although the sinister Merry England of the Distributists never came to pass, they did inspire artists who despaired of flourishing under capitalism. The sculptor Eric ...”

“... animation. But Olamina dies before the starships actually take off. The first is called the Christopher Columbus, in spite of her objections. ‘This ship is not about a shortcut to riches and empire. It’s not about snatching up slaves and gold and presenting them to some European monarch. But one can’t win every battle. One must know which battles ...”

“... world of Ranters, Fifth Monarchy Men, Levellers and millenarian preachers which E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill describe in their work. For Thompson, Pilgrim’s Progress is one of the two ‘founding texts of the English working-class movement’ (the other is The Rights of Man). And so to admire Bunyan is by definition to be a dissenting radical, a ...”

“... TV series in the 1970s, with Anthony Valentine as a notably suave and sinister Raffles and Christopher Strauli as a frightened Bunny. The combination of mannered elegance and genuine nervous tension never fails.Ernest William Hornung, always known as Willie, was born in Middlesbrough in 1866, the youngest of eight children of a coal merchant from ...”

“... breaketh, and, one would think, perisheth; but behold, it receiveth life, it chitteth, it putteth forth a blade, and groweth into a stalk, there also appeareth an ear; it also sweetly blossoms, with a full kernel in the ear: it is the same wheat, yet behold how the form and fashion of that which now ariseth, doth differ from that which then was sown, its ...”

“... Welles, Jean Renoir, Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx and many others. Brecht and Christopher Isherwood had briefly lived and worked in the cottage where I was pounding out the first draft of an adaptation in collaboration with my director, Sydney Pollack. Isherwood now lived on the palisade just above the street. The memory of this creative ...”

“... Jonson’s words, could challenge comparison with ‘all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome/Sent forth’. Yet both seem to have felt ambivalent about their trade. As we can tell from the verses he wrote on the publication of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, Middleton could be sympathetic to the grandeur of claims like Jonson’s: with a disdainful ...”

“... kind of falling away. (The gain is obvious enough and thus less interesting to analyse.) I asked Christopher Hitchens, long before he was terminally ill, where he would go if he had only a few weeks to live. Would he stay in America? ‘No, I’d go to Dartmoor, without a doubt,’ he told me. It was the landscape of his childhood. Dartmoor, not the MD ...”

“... In​ autumn 2000, the critic, memoirist and biographer James Atlas brought forth a Life of Saul Bellow that augured to be the literary event of the season, a crowning glory for author and subject. Bellow: A Biography was Atlas’s highly anticipated successor to his wunderkind biography of the brilliant, bedevilled Delmore Schwartz, whose combustible presence served as the inspiration for Von Humboldt Fleisher in Bellow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Humboldt’s Gift ...”