“... and record all the necessary authenticating detail of her settings: Cambridge before the Great War, Germany in the time of Goethe and Novalis, Pre-Revolutionary Moscow. The achievements of the novelist betoken a wonderfully economical habit, but perhaps the trick is more difficult to bring off in the even more limited space of the short story; and it is ...”

“... which is that its author does not realise he is in a tragedy at all. In 1999, at the time of the war in Kosovo, Paul was taken to hospital with what turned out to be an aortic aneurysm; he very nearly died, and after several weeks in a coma he was troubled by hallucinations. What brought him to his senses, he wrote in an LRB Diary the same year, was ‘that ...”

“... paralysis. In Ceylon, the introduction of new taxes to cut costs without burdening British middle-class taxpayers triggered the emergence of a protest movement that soon encompassed around sixty thousand men.The revolutions involved a panorama of charismatic actors, from Giuseppe Garibaldi to the Romanian radical Ana Ipătescu, from the French socialist Louis ...”

“... micro-neuro-surgery. None of this means that de Michelis was the worst specimen of that political class which is now, in its entirety, headed for oblivion, if not prison. On the contrary, he was one of the very best. Not merely cunning in the manner of all successful politicians, not merely clever as better politicians are, not merely highly intelligent, but ...”

“... and Bobbety Cranborne all arrived at Eton in 1906, the first two from the affluent middle class and the other two from aristocratic families. Lyttelton went on to Cambridge and the others to Oxford, but they all served in the Grenadier Guards in 1914-18, and all four entered Churchill’s cabinet during the Second World ...”

“... Much or the last volume of Proust’s novel is devoted to life in Paris during the First World War. Proust, the least chauvinistic of writers, is nevertheless so moved by patriotic sentiment as to transgress the convention which keeps a fictional world separate from its author: In this book in which there is not a single incident which is not fictitious, not a single character who is a real person in disguise ...”

“... began. In line with Mao’s desire to expose intellectuals to the conditions of the working class and peasants, he voluntarily spent four years in one of the poorest regions in Henan province with a group of idealistic students who wanted to combine a life of manual labour with self-directed study. In 1972, he moved with them to a factory and spent ten ...”

“... liberals both supported large-scale coal mining as the enabler of traditional, authentic, working-class communities, and abominated it as global warming’s lead culprit. Only an accident of history allowed these sentiments to be consecutive rather than concurrent. Liberals prize the authentically local, the person or product or way of being that is ...”

“... is either knit together into a single pattern or fragmented into sub-sets of rival fan groups at war with one another and also with the over-arching wider society. This is not, one would suppose, a particularly original position, but the Elias/Dunning ‘figurational’ schema differs from Malinowski’s ‘institutional’ approach in that it emphasises ...”

“... a volumetric flask. That’s what a boiling flask is for. Did you learn nothing from my chemistry class? JESSE: No. You flunked me. Remember? Prick. By season five, despite Breaking Bad’s addictive qualities, the comedy’s thinning out, and the ending of one particular episode is so shocking and distressing that it was weeks before I could bring myself to ...”

“... liked to say, ‘and both of them are gone: San Francisco and Shanghai. They had intrigue and class. They were international and everyone dressed right.’ Dressing right was big with Bruno. He always wore a jacket, specially made to accommodate his girth, a tie and monogrammed shirt, also custom-made, with cufflinks. He wanted his bar to have ...”

“... a prideful independence in public affairs, as if he were the last noble soul in a governing class captured by ambition and greed. Many contemporaries suspected him of reactionary conservatism, or at least nostalgia for the Ancien Régime – a charge Tocqueville always denied. But some of his more recent defenders, among them the historian Olivier Zunz ...”

“... glamorous one. But his journey across the political spectrum, from the bohemian radicalism of pre-war Greenwich Village, to Trotskyist left-oppositionism, to the conservatism of William F. Buckley’s National Review, seemed to exemplify the failures of socialism in the 20th century. In his final years Eastman himself was sometimes overcome by a sense of ...”

“... it made sure an invitation was sent. He was at the Western Front during the First World War, in Manhattan in the Jazz Age, on the picket-line during the Great Depression, in the Soviet Union just before the news of Stalin’s butchery started to become widely known. Although his relations with the Zeitgeist soured in the second half of his ...”

“... or appears to turn more cruel, than ever before? When it reels from inflicted blows – pandemic, war, starvation, climate devastation or all these together – what happens to the fabric of the mind? Is its only option defensive – to batten down the hatches, to haul up the drawbridge, or simply to survive? And does that leave room to grieve, not just for ...”