“... taken orders, Smith had gone as a gentleman’s tutor to Edinburgh, where he was welcomed by the young Turks of the Whig élite, with whom, in 1802, he founded the Edinburgh Review. Great wits don’t always readily agree, and there was another on the scene in the person of Henry Cockburn, whose career and reputation show several points of similarity with ...”

“... pre-Reformation who nobly gave his head to forces beyond his control. Most absurdly, because of Robert Bolt’s screenplay, this barrister of Catholic repression is widely envisioned as modernity’s diapason: the clear, strong note of individual conscience, sounding against the authoritarian intolerance of the Early Modern state. Thomas More died in ...”

“... The Spectator, once suavely edited, now serves as a fraternity house for Douglas Murray, Toby Young, James Delingpole and Rod Liddle; pummelling Muslims and high-fiving on Brexit, these right-wing bros are to the posh periodicals what Jeremy Clarkson was to the BBC. Murray’s book-length screed, The Strange Death of Europe, is full of Trump-style ...”

“... one that washes over you when you see flights advertised for 99p: something just isn’t right. Robert Greenwald’s documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price makes a strong argument about what exactly is not right. It boils down to the question of just how Wal-Mart achieves its control of costs – a word which, in a business context, to a large ...”

“... Iwo Jima campaign, Flags of Our Fathers (2006). An old man is remembering his participation as a young marine in raising the Stars and Stripes on top of Mount Suribachi, a moment immortalised in another famous photograph, taken by Joe Rosenthal, perhaps the most reproduced photograph in American history. Late in his life, though, it is not Rosenthal’s 1945 ...”

“... entirely fitting for a piece written within the context of marital negotiations, especially by a young and attention-seeking poet. Dunbar is the first writer in Scots who can legitimately be called a ‘Court poet’. The Scottish kings had no great tradition of encouraging literary patronage, and indeed for much of Dunbar’s career at James IV’s Court ...”

“... Picasso had, after 1950, become Adolf Wölfli, or John Ford had ended up as John Cassavetes. Or if Robert Crumb had turned into his obsessive mad-genius brother, Charles Crumb. If thisweredrawn byKirby inthe 1970sit wouldbe a massivegleaminghystericallyhyperarticulatedpsychedelicedifice ...”

“... It’s a Knockout, in which ephebes aged under 20 tried to steal cheeses from an altar guarded by young men aged 20 or over. A priestess stood by, holding a little wooden image of the goddess, who was identified with savage Artemis. If the whipping was too restrained and not enough blood was spattering her altar, Artemis would grow impossibly heavy until the ...”

“... had been, handing out large sums at unpredictable moments (for example, to his old wartime friend Robert Graves, but only after they had ceased to be real friends).Sassoon was a great self-fashioner. He was also intensely self-aware, open-hearted (though capable of mean-spiritedness), restless, prickly, brave, idealistic, never content, eternally tussling ...”

“... and excelled at debate. But Buchanan was a robust defender of popular sovereignty. He taught his young king about the sins of his mother. James learned about the brutality and the infidelities of the Scottish – specifically Stewart – monarchs. James VI came, Buchanan said, from ‘a bloody nest’. The perfect king, by contrast, would be a ‘lover of ...”

“... published since the war, but I hope to do better than that. It will, I hope, be the story of a young man of the 20th century and his Muse, his dazzling, dancing, fascinating mistress. I owe it to my cock-teasing mistress to get it all down. Much that is attractive about Powell, and a good deal of what makes his compatriots occasionally shy away from ...”

“... Bergamasque, 1890; Images oubliées, 1894) are promising but generally conventional, while the young Ravel was cultivating a Satie-like modal delicacy (Menuet antique, 1895; Pavane pour une Infante défunte, 1899).’ Fauré, moreover, can be found – so Nectoux (backed by Françoise Gervais) suggests – exploring ‘new scales and occasionally Hindu ...”

“... The self-consciously brittle tone recalls Lewis’s Apes of God, early Huxley, and Eliot’s young man carbuncular. There are daring-for-the-time references to casual sexual intercourse, Stopesian contraceptive devices, cheap silken undergarments, pick-ups in Lyons Corner Houses. There is much worldly wisdom along the lines of: ‘All attractive girls ...”

“... know about her could be more satisfactory to me than this.’ Despite Welty’s prompt adoption by Robert Penn Warren and the Southern Review crowd, the figure who emerges from Portor’s 1941 text is Austenish, ‘a quiet, tranquil-looking, modest girl’ who sits in a corner listening. Many years, honours, fellowships and prizes later, Paul Binding meets ...”

“... mixture of excitable populism and authoritarianism, the latter copied from his revered mentor, Sir Robert Peel, whose ‘Canute-like executive arrogance’ had wrought so much damage in the 1840s. In this account Gladstone emerges as a half-crazed genius, who, unexpectedly elected as master of the college, had then gone on to write a weekly column for the ...”