“... situation grows increasingly serious,’ his tone is not alarmed but exultant. A ‘great war’ means a prospect of liberation, not of indiscriminate slaughter. His other main political concern is with the growing power of the Jews and the rise of Polish anti-semitism. The idea that ‘there’s going to be trouble with the Jews’ is one of the novel’s ...”

“... Zollverein to grip colonial sentiment. Rugby was in part, for South Africans especially, a means of adapting British cultural implantations for the creation of a distinctive and differentiating identity. The alienness of the 1906-7 Springboks was signalled by the fact that, on the field, for tactical reasons, they communicated in Afrikaans. It hardly ...”

“... a plausible and formative life: that version of the Author is dead as a dodo for her. And that means questioning the importance of childhood, and the archetypal, claustrophobic family romance that’s supposed to be so character-forming. Yes, it’s significant that she grew up in various places – born in Geneva in 1923, brought up in Belgium and in ...”

“... a stimulus that elicits an automatic response’, he wrote. ‘You become all attention, which means that you become, for the moment, selfless and in a sense entirely identified with the object of your attention … For the cultivated eye, the picture repeats its instantaneous unity like a mouth repeating a single word.’ The genius of ...”

“... out of a difficult life is an idea that some moderns have endorsed. In his ‘Essay on Suicide’, David Hume thought it would be strange for God to deny us an option that even a malaria mosquito could inflict; Georges Poulet disagreeably proclaimed that death by one’s own hand is the only act that avoids the twin perils of a meaningless existence and a ...”

“... and roadless places, and corruption and incompetence galore. The current conservative senator, David Vitter, has been mixed up with prostitutes while preaching family values; the Democratic congressman from New Orleans had to resign after he was found to have an unexplained $90,000 in his freezer (in an interesting twist, the disarray he created in the ...”

“... an aversion to making decisions, especially difficult decisions involving confrontation – which means nearly all leadership decisions. In the latter half of both books Corbyn is increasingly absent, and his decisions, when he does make them, are Delphic. He sometimes seems irritated by having responsibility for matters that don’t interest him, even ...”

“... a hundred crowns, but not a penny performed . . . Then, after all this, there was by my only means set down unto the Lord Keeper and the Lord of Buckhurst the notablest and vildest articles of atheism that I suppose the like were never known or read of in any age, all which I can show unto you. They were delivered to Her Highness, and command given by ...”

“... of power in Hungary and Bulgaria.’ If there was a civil war in Poland, I missed it – unless he means the declaration of martial law in 1981. Neither did the ‘mass mobilisations’ and protests of 1989 feel like old-fashioned class war. Which classes? The label might just stick if it were written in neo-Marxist terms: the struggle between a ‘New ...”

“... Commune up to 1968 displayed ‘the pacification of political manners’, or ‘civil war by other means’. Then came the first ‘modern revolution’ – modern in the sense that ‘it did not aim at taking power.’ And since? In Hazan’s view, a long period of calm, with the city ‘stuck in the continuum of the Bergsonian time of domination and ...”

“... stance to begin with: shortly before assuming the presidency for the first time in 2000, he told David Frost he sought ‘more profound’ integration with Nato, and ‘would not rule out’ Russian membership. In the aftermath of the 11 September attacks – having himself levelled the remains of Grozny in what was billed as a ‘counterterrorist ...”

“... it might have posed to the Conservative electoral juggernaut at the 2015 election. Nick Clegg and David Laws would have done better to reflect on the lessons of the 1880s. If free-market pro-EU Liberals had fought the 2015 election as a small but boisterous and essential entity within a Cameron-led coalition, on the model of the Liberal Unionists after ...”

“... emphasises, ‘evolution’ was not a single idea, and the history of thinking about it has by no means been a simple story of the triumph of science over superstition. In the early Victorian period, it was geology, rather than biology, that set the pace. Clergymen were among the many who loved getting out their geological hammers and specimen bags, but what ...”

“... terms. Though known as ‘lucky Jack Aubrey’ from a few early prize-money successes, he is by no means generally fortunate, on sea or land, and the nature of his embarrassments are accurately typical of the Navy and of English society at the time. Like Farrell, O’Brian has solved in his own individual way the intractable problem of getting history – in ...”

“... Stuart Montgomery, the publisher of Gunslinger (and of Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Basil Bunting, David Jones and Roy Fisher), a wispy-moustached medical man with a significant hobby, decided to do something about the sluggishness and indolence of mainstream critics. He flew off to Las Vegas and took a cab to the hotel where Howard Hughes was rumoured to be ...”