“... because of rather than despite their brilliance, one sometimes wonders if he doesn’t over-read the evidence. What if the ‘emotional blankness’ of so much of Cranach’s religious painting springs not from a ‘new aesthetic’, but from imaginative exhaustion, or from the routinisation and decline of quality inevitable given the use of assistants ...”

“... I’d say it was a place called Nearleeds, because no one had heard of Dewsbury, unless they’d read Betty Boothroyd’s biography or remembered who Eddie Waring was. But then the headlines started coming: the highest BNP vote in the country; the attempted hanging of a small boy; a 7 July bomber from Lees Holm. Each a surprise, and yet not. My Yorkshireness ...”

“... War on your shelves. Both Radchenko’s and Vladislav Zubok’s new books are ones you want to read. They make comprehensible a Russian perspective on a key question of 20th-century history that we generally see only from the American side. A ‘Russian perspective’ is quite different from a pro-Russian bias, which neither book has. It means showing how ...”

“... press and an independent judiciary); by 1992, it was 35 per cent. He began his piece by quoting Richard Holbrooke on the previous year’s Bosnian elections: what if free and fair elections put in power ‘racists, fascists and separatists’? In The Light That Failed (2019), Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argue that the rise of illiberalism in Eastern ...”

“... October 2021. The party was polling in the low single digits. Only a few hundred people turned up. Richard Tice, who had replaced Nigel Farage as leader seven months earlier, had chosen to hold the event on the same day – and in the same city, Manchester – as the Conservative Party Conference. He hired a battle bus with a sound system to drive past the ...”

“... and Goldman appears to mean it, at the time. But it is not what he turns out to mean. One needs to read no further than twenty pages into the book to realise that Goldman’s true feelings involve a rearrangement of his terms. What he really means is that ‘mass culture’s deep atavistic longing for royalty has betrayed American democracy.’ This it has ...”

“... an interpretation rather than a given. (The best description of this theme in modern thought is Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.) Derrida, in criticising ‘presence’ and ‘Western Metaphysics’, is, along with Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Sellars and Quine, criticising the ‘myth of the given’ – the myth that knowledge can be ...”

“... of the experiment in tripartite government is relentlessly laid out. It is not an easy read, but two aspects of it are especially striking all this time later. One is the sense of an age that has utterly passed. For those who lived through it, there’s a grisly horror in being forced to remember a long-gone mantra like ‘Stage Three of the ...”

“... checklist of French pop performers: Sylvie Vartan (‘a tarty-looking piece’), Johnnie Halliday, Richard Anthony. Alien noises ‘coming out of my daughter’s battery-operated Dansette record-player’. These temporal prompts, supposed to shift us back into period, are obtrusive. The quality of the writing makes its own time, all times, the present of the ...”

“... in this volume of essays on his work. But in any case, Hall’s chameleon-like career can be read just as plausibly in terms of consistency as of fashionability. Where he is now, proclaiming the virtues of a pluralist politics which thrusts culture to the fore, is pretty much where he kicked off in the days of the old New Left. It is not so much that he ...”

“... Minutes later, he picked up a copy of Severnaya Kommuna, the organ of the Petrograd Soviet, and read a rant by Zinoviev in praise of the Party monopoly on power which derided the ‘fallacious democratic liberties demanded by the counter-revolution’. Serge smothered his misgivings – War Communism required many allowances to be made – but he knew how ...”

“... Homer’s 18th-century readers and translators. While the scholars – such as the much maligned Richard Bentley – who took the position of the ‘moderns’ thought it necessary to absorb the scholarly and editorial record, and to steep themselves in Greek history and culture in order to get anywhere near understanding the poetry, others, like ...”

“... religious reawakening, sold well and was made into a sentimental movie starring Judy Holliday and Richard Conte. Backed by a reasonably lavish promotional campaign (‘In a CHANGING world, this motion picture is joyously dedicated to the heartwarming fact that BABIES still come in the same old, wonderfully old-fashioned way!’), the film was profitable and ...”

“... starring Alec Guinness, or Martin Ritt’s version of The Spy who Came in from the Cold with Richard Burton, it’s possible to persuade yourself that le Carré might even be the greatest English novelist alive. Unfortunately, looking at his other books the next morning makes this seem less likely, in part because the classic phase of his career ended ...”

“... least around, often to his assistants.) One of the Coke paintings has painterly drips that might read as signs of expressive gestures, while the other is almost as pristine as the commercial original, right down to the registered trademark. His friends opted for the iconic Coke, and Pop was born. Although now sealed with the false obviousness of ...”