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“... to time. What is one to make of the ambiguous qualification of Eliot as ‘the last – let us hope, the latest – great poet and great critic in English’ in an essay which seems to plead for the superiority of an American which is ‘inherently transitory’? To the young Eliot’s comment that such a manifestation ‘does not represent the evolution ...”

“... the rights of man are to be upheld in a dark time, we shall require an age of reason,’ wrote Christopher Hitchens last year on the dust jacket of Harvey Kaye’s recent book on Paine.* And as if to reinforce that message, he has now himself published a little book on Paine, a ‘biography’ of Rights of Man. It begins with a dedication, ‘by ...”

“... Helms asked himself: “Is my Agency responsible for this?” and answered: “I certainly hope not.” ’ The CIA, in other words, knew that both Ruby and Oswald were involved in the febrile politics of Cuban exile resentment, and the scuzzy world of the fruit-machine kings. The CIA therefore prayed that this footprint would not be discovered. It did ...”

“... and principles find themselves glossed away. It is tacitly urged that theory is our only hope, as when we are told either to try to understand other cultures or else to ‘find a theory (and not just a prejudice) that allows us to overlook their existence’. The use of ‘prejudice’ there is prejudicial, since converts can gullibly be won to the ...”

“... and historians have about each other, and so may even contribute to the realisation of Braudel’s hope that ‘the social sciences, at least provisionally, would suspend their constant border disputes ... and make possible the first stages of some sort of coming together.’ That was written 22 years ...”

“... your children to play ant games, adding numbers to numbers and so forth,’ she explains. ‘I hope you now understand why. We do not want to turn your children into ants.’The otherworldly Arroyos, the sinister, worldly Dmitri, and Simón, the sceptical man of reason who’s lacking in warmth, battle for David’s soul. Not for the first time, there’s ...”

“... comparing everybody to the Brownshirts, ‘the principle is the same.’) However, there was hope. A small group of classics students copied out and xeroxed a passage against ochlocracy from Plato’s Republic and passed it out as a leaflet. Bloom sounds just like Bellow when he recalls this moment: ‘They had learned from this old book what was going ...”

“... benefits have been questioned.) He founded a more vocal group called Médecins du monde, in the hope of carrying out more such operations. Kouchner has spent the last three decades trying to translate his humanitarian reputation into political, military and diplomatic influence of a more traditional kind. In 1988, Mitterrand created a post for him as ...”

“... squares. The European Community was founded after the darkest period of European history, in the hope that it would safeguard democracy, create prosperity and foster reconciliation. Under the ‘Copenhagen criteria’ agreed by the European Council in 1993, the conditions for accession to the EU include ‘stable institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule ...”

“... character – whether my pose is exorcising the real Me,’ he notes unhappily in one letter. ‘Hope not.’ It is only when his friend inadvertently strikes on this fugitive self-doubt, that Tynan rises to convincing nastiness: ‘You have never been to Oxford and as far as I know, you have no close acquaintance amongst Oxford men,’ he tells ...”

“... of evil’ are not confident but longing; they illustrate his tentative discipline of hope. Ricks sees the reversals as final: ‘What he does in this poem is what he loves to do: to transmute nightmares into dreams for kindly issues. Such redemptions, such feats of rescue and renovation, are characteristic of how his mind works with ...”

“... as the blurb of Francis Spufford’s engaging new book calls them, meaning above all Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins – believe in spite of all evidence that eventually the religious will see sense. And yet with their magical belief in the truth of science – their taking for granted a consensus about the value of scientific evidence ...”

“... and general readers’ – that is, by making it fairly easy to understand. No textbook could hope to succeed if written in the manner of Lacan or of Kristeva, and this one, with its laudable missionary aspirations, has to tread carefully the line between a possibly fraudulent lucidity and an opacity fatal to proselytising and commerce.The Introduction ...”

“... Faced​ with the threatening possibility of hope, Beckett liked to get his retaliation in first. ‘Downhill begins this year,’ he announced with grim satisfaction in 1966. Even this may have been a slip, allowing the possibility of there having been an ‘up’ from which to come down. Usually his defences were in place in advance: ‘All is I suppose as well as can be expected by one with my powers of expectation ...”

“... in the publication, nearly a century on, of Faber’s two all-comprehending new tomes, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. The editors promise to ‘elucidate the difficulties’ of Eliot’s work by tracing every possible verbal overlap between the words used in his poems and the words used by other writers, both famous and obscure, in texts that ...”