“... in Paris. She would borrow Resnais’s apartment, investigate Blanchot for her translator friend Richard Howard, go to see the latest Godard film or visit the catacombs with her son. In the late 1960s, she fell in love with Nicole Stéphane, who had acted in Jean-Pierre Melville’s films but now produced her own. Stéphane, who was descended from the ...”

“... of expression might – only might – cease to be perceived as a menace to national security. As Richard Sakwa’s book suggests, Putin has a choice of two directions. One is simply to ‘reconcentrate state power’. The other is to ‘reconstitute’ that power in a new form by imposing the rule of law. Putin talks a lot about ‘the dictatorship of ...”

“... of themselves when they imagine they are performing for an audience of one. On the strength of Richard Mangan’s edition, we must assume that Gielgud’s contribution to the documenting of theatrical history will be uncertain (‘I had never noticed that Albee had such big ears!’) while his contribution to the understanding of bad character is ...”

“... in public schools, which ordered states to allow women some access to abortion, which directed Richard Nixon to release incriminating tapes, which ordered states to permit same-sex marriage, and which rejected Donald Trump’s last-ditch pleas for a judicial coup d’état. It is also the court which ruled that African Americans, no matter their ...”

“... the cable was a joke of some sort. It might just as well have been an invitation from Cosima and Richard Wagner to come to Bayreuth, or from T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to spend an afternoon at the offices of the Dial. It took me about two days to ascertain from various friends in New York and Paris that it was indeed genuine, and far less time than that ...”

“... Party’s deputy chairman. Then the second disaster: he offers £2000 to a prostitute so that she may go abroad. The deal takes place at Victoria Station, where Archer’s proxy meets the prostitute, who is in league with the News of the World. The story breaks. Archer resigns as deputy chairman, but sues another tabloid, the Daily Star, for libel. The ...”

“... if they were to be prevented, there would be far fewer books. I am not confident that either book may be said to be well-written; that question, too, could be thought to arise. In Search of a Past affects not to be written at all – so much as researched, recorded and compiled. But the editorial method which is applied to the data has much to display that is ...”

“... obscure provisions need deciphering; occasional nonsense needs correcting; perfectly clear texts may be impossible to apply to novel situations. These and other quotidian exercises are the subject of judgments and commentaries which try to bring ordered methods to bear on the translation of a text into an outcome – that is to say, on trying to give a law ...”

“... that the deity tends not to comment directly on current affairs these days, the anxious recruit may have struggled to put this advice into practice. Browsing leaders from the previous couple of decades might have yielded a more concrete sense of what was wanted. It would appear that omniscience is one attribute of the God-like perspective; absence of ...”

“... in environmental disputes, quite apart from what we say on behalf of the humans involved (who may or may not have an interest in letting the trees live). Philosophers are more cautious about rights-talk. Rights, they say, are not to be invoked lightly, and are certainly not to be attributed on every occasion when some ...”

“... funds. ‘It’s a long time since I saw a picture I wanted so much,’ he wrote to McGreevy. In May 1936 he told McGreevy that Yeats had ‘brought up the subject of the picture … I since borrowed £10 which he accepted as a first instalment, the remaining £20 to follow God knows when, & have now got the picture. Mother & Frank [Beckett’s ...”

“... interesting about them. Mr Clark rather disproportionately brings Yeats in at this point. Yeats may have concerned himself with the sacred mysteries, but they were not where he saw and heard poetry. He saw and heard poetry in real life. Mr Clark concedes that Yeats developed towards a pregnant natural speech as Brennan did not, but he could have conceded ...”

“... of Vanity Fair. In ‘real life’, Meredith judiciously observes in his novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, ‘all hangs together,’ but that’s not obviously the way things work in the Meredithian world. What did his admirers see in him? A good place to start is G.M. Trevelyan’s The Poetry and Philosophy of George Meredith (1906), which helpfully ...”

“... of moral language, and this project was taken up and carried out with exceptional skill by Richard Hare, a contemporary of the four who had returned to Oxford after a horrible wartime experience as a prisoner of the Japanese. (I once heard him say about The Bridge on the River Kwai that while the film’s settings were disturbingly realistic, having ...”

“... burned at the stake in front of jeering crowds. Imaginative though Dante’s infernal punishments may be, the spirit behind them was familiar. It would be hard to miss the continuity between history and the Inferno. What was Dante’s position in all this? The third child of a mother who died when he was very young, he belonged to neither the old landed elite ...”