“... philosophers, have pored over such matters in order to understand the world; and one or two may have come round to his conclusion, that the point is to change it. This seems an unlikely role in which to cast Roy Jenkins. But when the urbane biographer of Asquith undertook the 1979 Dimbleby Lecture (now reprinted in The Rebirth of Britain) he was clearly ...”

“... must always have been striking, although not in James Beck’s view. Ilaria, Beck concedes, ‘may look “Gothic” ’ – as if we were about to claim that she actually was Gothic. Indeed, her narrow, high-collared dress, belted below the breast, with long curving folds falling from belt to feet is Gothic – but, who knows, she might be less so if she ...”

“... had ‘wittingly’ spied on Americans – a lie for which he has never been held to account. In May 2017, he told NBC’s Chuck Todd that the Russians were highly likely to have colluded with Trump’s campaign because they are ‘almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favour, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique’. The current ...”

“... In a letter of May 1919 Hardy told his friend Sir George Douglas he hadn’t been doing much, ‘mainly destroying old papers’. ‘How they raise ghosts,’ he added. He was still at it in September when he complained of the ‘dismal work’ of destroying papers that were of ‘absolutely no use for any purpose God or man’s ...”

“... or another. Yet even from the restricted sample quoted something else, not so easily classified, may spring to the eye. Most such ethno-nationalist conflicts seem to happen in predominantly rural situations. Nor are they rural merely in the sense of being agricultural or non-urban – like East Anglia, say, or the Beauce plain in central France – they are ...”

“... in a play that deals with the private act of love and the public role of childbearing. But there may be a further dimension of meaning. Paulina in The Winter’s Tale struggles to get the imprisoned Queen’s newborn infant out past the jailer: This Childe was prisoner to the wombe, and is By Law and processe of great Nature, thence Free’d and ...”

“... its use, whether state of war or threat of war or any other public emergency; none of these may be invoked as a justification. Orders from superiors are explicitly excluded as a defence, and moreover the Convention requires that wherever the torture occurred and whatever the nationality of the torturer or victim, parties must prosecute or extradite ...”

“... but a defence of the freedom of poets to write as, and what, they wish. No big problem, you may think. But suppose poetry was not the minority pursuit it has become in Britain today. Suppose it was the most popular form of entertainment available, the nearest equivalent to our mass media. That is not far from the truth about the world in which Plato ...”

“... rhetoric. I am not trying to underplay the practical, political and economic disasters that may face us, from what on earth will happen on the Irish border to where the Welsh farmers will sell their sheep. But we do need to attend also to the cheap, fruitless, repetitive and wordy stand-off we have descended to.On the one hand, there are those whose ...”

“... or upstairs in Carl’s room, or by the stream that flows from the lime-trees into the Oder. May the past and the future sweeten your present, may you be happy as in a dream, until – well, who could spell it out? A long kiss on your lips. P.S. Greet your parents from me – tell me, why do I feel uneasy whenever I ...”

“... a little doll has been stabbed to death, or drowned in the bath, or gassed by carbon monoxide; she may have hanged herself on the laundry line (or is it just supposed to look that way?), jumped or been pushed off a high balcony – or was she shot first? Frances Glessner Lee, a Gilded Age Chicago heiress whose family made a fortune in farm equipment, had no ...”

“... May I help you. No. In the mirror? No. Look there is still majesty, increase, sacrifice. Night in the flat pond. Moon in it/on it disposing entirely of mind. No. Look there is desert where there was grassland there is sun-inundation like a scrupulous meditation no message just mutter of immensity where it leaks into partiality ...”

“... archives to unearth ‘Marx before Marxism’. But who is Marx after Marxism? Cold War reflexes may still make it difficult to reread the Manifesto with fresh eyes. But the world is no longer divided into lethally armed Marxist and anti-Marxist camps. Somnambulant cadres have ceased reciting the work as a secular catechism, while upright anti-Communists no ...”

“... of Selfhood’, that we no longer need a distinction between morality and prudence, one may seem to be encouraging immorality.* By way of defence, I shall argue here that these distinctions between absolutism and relativism, rationality and irrationality, morality and expediency, are obsolete and clumsy tools – remnants of a vocabulary which we ...”

“... in what was happening. The heightened images of tension and disruption in her poems of the 1940s may have had other sources too, but the war made its way into the nervous system of her poems indirectly and mysteriously. Robert Lowell was a high-profile conscientious objector, writing to Roosevelt in September 1943 with a ‘Declaration of Personal ...”