“... in his serial working but is ‘beginning to see that there is something after all to be said for that method, even if in the end it works back to old tonic & dominant!’ There is, of course, a big difference between a 12-note row and a 12-note tune: the former is rarely also the latter, and Walton’s conflation of them is not without a clodhopping ...”

“... Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. David O. Selznick praised Eisenstein’s Dreiser adaptation, but said that its critique of American society ‘cannot possibly offer anything but a most miserable two hours to millions of happy-minded young Americans’. ‘Let’s try new things by all means,’ Selznick wrote, ‘but let’s keep these gambles within the ...”

“... The Hobbit appeared in the Times Literary Supplement. The Hobbit was, the anonymous reviewer said, ‘a children’s book only in the sense that the first of many readings can be undertaken in the nursery’. It was to be compared to Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories, as belonging to ‘a very small class of books which have nothing in common save that ...”

“... he never accepted the validity of a single system of thought or belief – so much the better. He said himself that he wrote poems ‘not because it is smart to be a poet but because I enjoy it, as one enjoys swimming or swearing, and also because it is my road to freedom and knowledge’. The usual précis of his career is that, after a dazzling start, the ...”

“... who together with the young historian Arnold Toynbee was responsible for the dossier submitted to Edward Grey, was a Gladstonian Liberal with an interest in the Armenians – and a contempt for Turkish rule – which stretched back forty years. Bryce and Toynbee’s research (see extracts on page 19) exemplified a crucial stage in the evolution of Western ...”

“... the course of the war in Afghanistan and the so-called war on terror. Not all were in prison, he said: some had been ‘otherwise dealt with’. ‘Let’s put it this way,’ he continued, ‘they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.’ Many people around the world wondered at the time precisely what the president meant ...”

“... self par excellence, the first great battlefield for these struggles. Libido, Foucault said, is ‘one’s will’ going ‘beyond the limits God originally set for it’, and it was capitalism’s dependence on this boundless libido, the limitless desires needed to stoke its fires, that made solitary sex a site of such anxiety. Sex has ‘nothing ...”

“... who may be getting above themselves. Margaret Thatcher was such a prime minister, but so too was Edward Heath, perhaps to an even greater extent (Heath’s cabinet was composed almost entirely of admirers and minions), which goes to show that dominance does not automatically translate into success. Tony Blair was not a dominant prime minister: how could he ...”

“... of the LRB feel liberated by learning the details of female circumcision? In the same decade, Edward Sapir, analysing many North American languages, advanced the doctrine that a language reflects the way that its speakers understand the world – a way that may be incomprehensible without the language. Kant’s a prioris, structures of the human ...”

“... the police with a donos, or remain silent and risk more people dying? ‘I would tell them,’ he said, after a moment’s thought. ‘But I would hate myself for doing so.’America, as I realised soon after arriving there as a budding Sovietologist in the Cold War, is different. Telling the authorities about another citizen’s wrongdoing becomes an ipso ...”

“... rooted in over three hundred and thirty years of Spanish rule. Not for nothing is it sometimes said that the Philippines is as much a part of Latin America as it is of South-East Asia.Yet it was Latin America with a difference. By the time the Spanish arrived in the 1560s, Felipe II’s empire was already in decline, and the Philippines, named after ...”

“... Orchestra (1939) might slot seamlessly into a concert programme of English string pieces like Edward Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro for Strings and Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, but by the time of his third opera, The Knot Garden, first performed in 1970, Tippett was using an electric guitar, keyboard and drum kit to pump the liberating ...”

“... the first Canadian novel, and then reaches for the next book on the shelf: an 1858 memoir by Edward John Trelawny who ‘burned Shelley’s body and saved the heart’, who ‘turned the shroud back to have a look at Byron’s lame foot’. She begins to see Trelawny, not as a historical figure but as himself: ‘What a man! Big.’ And then she looks up ...”

“... Lacan​ said that there was surely something ironic about Christ’s injunction to love thy neighbour as thyself – because actually, of course, people hate themselves. Or you could say that, given the way people treat one another, perhaps they had always loved their neighbours in the way they loved themselves: that is, with a good deal of cruelty and disregard ...”

“... of his life over again he might choose this one, the last. For Hume, nothing more needed to be said about waiting for death, a subject that we moderns have turned into a veritable genre. The 19th century brought a few memoirs of invalidism, like Harriet Martineau’s Life in the Sickroom, which reports on her five-year-long retreat from an active life. And ...”