“... to materials’ had since become a watchword for sculptors like Epstein and the young Henry Moore. Of carving and modelling, the twin poles of traditional sculpting, Stokes prefers the first because it can allow stone to ‘come to life’. What, then, is it for stone to live? What are the qualities it possesses, which fine carving is to ...”

“... States have intrinsic advantages over companies as pension providers: because they have the power to tax, and are around for a long time, they can count on those not yet born to pay for the pensions of those not yet retired. Today’s contributions are used to pay today’s retirees (a company that did this would be convicted of running a pyramid ...”

“... great days under Anthony Sampson and Sylvester Stein – and the energetic assistant editor Henry Nxumalo, who was murdered on an investigative assignment – were coming to an end. Stein’s successor, Tom Hopkinson, was a more cautious editor, but Drum had assembled some of the best writers in the country, among them Es’kia Mphahlele, Lewis Nkosi ...”

“... there had been no good way not to fight. Thomson’s father took him to see Laurence Olivier’s Henry V in 1945, the year after its release. ‘He said it was a matter of duty.’ The standard British movie fare of the day had plenty of ‘syrup’, he recalls, to ladle over the ‘suet pudding’ of tremulous national morale.Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), in ...”

“... England.’ The standard construction of this match is that it was the moment England’s great power delusions were exposed, its footballing Suez, provoking the tactical revolution that propelled it to World Cup victory in 1966 under Alf Ramsey, who had seen Hungarian fluidity and athleticism up close in 1953 when playing as a headspun right-back in his ...”

“... service of God. ‘Bound to obey and serve’ was the motto chosen by Jane Seymour when she became Henry VIII’s queen, echoing the glad subservience still proclaimed by the Prince of Wales’s heraldic emblem: Ich dien.The language of heraldry served as a constant reminder that to engage in service was not simply to undertake a prescribed form of labour, but ...”

“... explorations of Portugal’s glorious past and evocations of its maritime heroes, including Prince Henry the Navigator, the poem about whom ends: ‘Lord, we still must win Portugal.’ The next poem claims that ‘The limitless sea is Portuguese.’ But, despite its patriotic tone, Pessoa’s book did not win the prize. Since his yearning for fame was more ...”

“... finds all this contemptible: men (and the occasional woman, such as Barbara Castle) bent on power and using prurience and censoriousness as a way to get it. It is all too easy to take the moral high ground when politicians are making a mockery of their own public standards; much harder to contain the corrosive effects of doing so. Witch hunts don’t ...”

“... story rather than the other guy’s. And Quintilian also associates enargeia or evidentia with the power of an orator to arouse passions in his audience. When a narrative has evidentia, ‘emotions will ensue just as if we were present at the event itself.’ So the vivid probability of narrative ‘evidence’ can drive those jurors wild.And it can do so ...”

“... It leaves out the thing that makes politics politics. Along with policy and presentation there is power, or to put it more bluntly, brute force. Sometimes, in order to get people to do what you want, it is necessary to coerce them. Reading this book, you would never know this was an option. It isn’t that Brown denies that it happens. He describes plenty of ...”

“... siphoned off to finance ‘security’. That audit reports were commissioned at all owes a lot to Henry Waxman, a Democrat and ranking minority member of the House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform. Waxman voted in favour of the invasion of Iraq. But since the war he’s been demanding that the Bush administration account for its cost. Within ...”

“... and Maximilien, Maximilien and the People. He quickly suspected that the heroes of ‘89, when in power, were merely old regime politicians with a different vocabulary. They spoke the language of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, while furthering their sectional interests. He tried to shame them into following the logic of their proclaimed ...”

“... Nora Barnacle’s hotel might well have been lost on Beckett. He specialised, after all, unlike Henry James, in allowing many things to be entirely lost on him. Like Wilde, he belonged to that group of Protestant geniuses who thought they should speak up just as their land-owning and money-owning colleagues were clearing out of Ireland or learning to keep ...”

“... account of the short-lived republic offer none. Supporters of democracy underestimated the emotive power and ruthlessness of the National Socialists, but even if they had been blessed with miraculously acute political antennae it is unlikely that they would have been able to induce Stalin to allow Communists to co-operate with socialists in the battle against ...”

“... Shakespeare turns chronicle into history, then history into drama, and then – in the superb Henry IV plays – historical drama into something almost like myth: free-standing, undocumented and legendary works of art. Two hundred years before the novel emerged in Europe, and psychology became a dominant language of experience, Shakespeare brought about ...”