“... only puny attacks. Their allies in the Afghan Taliban were a shadow of their former selves: they may have been fighting US forces with increasing vigour, but they were nowhere near conquering Kabul for a second time. It was much the same story in North Africa, where the local al-Qaida branch, al Shabab, was thrown out of Mogadishu by African Union forces ...”

“... The vote​ for Donald Trump may well have been what Michael Moore called the ‘biggest fuck-you ever recorded in human history’, delivered by the white working class to spite ‘the establishment’. But it isn’t just the size of the fuck-you that matters; it’s also who delivers it. A fuck-you can be sent via satirical parties (Iceland’s Best Party won the election for mayor of Reykjavik; Hungary’s Two-Tailed Dog Party had a hand in sabotaging Viktor Orbán’s recent anti-refugee referendum), or subversive parties (the Pirates), or grassroots movements turned parties (Podemos ...”

“... concern seriously isn’t necessarily to renounce all efforts at changing the law, though there may be some legal ends that are barely worth pursuing (this was Emma Goldman’s verdict on the ‘fetish’ for suffrage, as she saw it, in the women’s movement of the early 20th century). Law is not epiphenomenal: it is not without effects – not even the ...”

“... day of unpaid labour undertaken to celebrate Lenin’s birthday, was behind them and May Day, Easter and the 9 May holiday marking victory in the Second World War, were ahead. It was unseasonably warm. The systemic problems of the Chernobyl plant, and of RBMKs in general, were known only to a few. In 1979 the ...”

“... euphemism, found in the Spectator, this time referring to the former Kate Middleton: ‘She may still have her V-plates intact … the age-old requisite for future queen consorts.’ The equation of young women and toilets is gross and the far side of misogyny but it’s only to be expected in a tampophiliac family with a fondness for ...”

“... succeeded thanks to his own vandalism and Forster’s loyal destructions and suppressions. We may speculate, but we will never know the inner Dickens which those burned papers would have revealed. The biographer must remain for ever fenced-off. Kaplan’s is an academic’s view of things. For him and his university-based colleagues biographies, like ...”

“... the crowded dailiness which so stubbornly resists the unthinkable thought that one’s whole life may be about to collapse into barbarism, torture and insanity. The Age of Wonders tells first of Austria in the Thirties and of a family which is in no way saved from anti-semitic horror by the plea that the paterfamilias (an intellectual, a writer, and a ...”

“... over my body too. The immobile is in a fixed, restful state, whereas ‘motion, however swift it may seem, tends essentially towards immobility, and thus, however slowly it may sometimes appear to do so, continually conducts bodies towards death.’ The Bathroom may sound offputtingly ...”

“... Street Mephistopheles: he stays the same whatever he writes. A Greene, though, or an Ian Fleming, may have to become what he writes, exemplify his own formula, with results that affect himself and others. Interestingly, unlike the cases of Shakespeare or Pushkin, the work of Greene or Fleming, and its appeal, comes increasingly to depend on the new literary ...”

“... I’m low, I must confess, and need a prop     For a project sagging even as I speak. May I rehearse to you da capo (from the top)     The reasons why my outlook seems so bleak     In the herring-scented streets of Reykjavik? I have one precedent I can rely on: Your own impulsive Letter to Lord Byron. I can’t cast you as you cast suave ...”

“... literary-theoretical criticism in that he has no choice but to express himself in words; and, we may add, to learn about the past in words – through language, rhetoric, texts? Lord Acton wrote that our studies should have the chastity of mathematics. But that can never be, and I, for one, should not desire it. Elton says that historical evidence is that ...”

“... or (as the editors of Modernity and Identity prefer) ‘low-modernity’. However reluctant one may be to see it go, modernity appears to be slipping away, and the need to discover its identity seems correspondingly urgent. If, for the sake of clarity, we take the modern era to include at least the period from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th ...”

“... original (moreover, I suspect that, in addition to wax and wood, textile was employed). The gold may explain the survival: it transformed a painter’s model into a work of miniature sculpture attractive to the collector. After his return to Florence in 1510 Sansovino was commissioned to carve a half life-size marble Bacchus for a garden. He created the ...”

“... not readily imitable. Although Hoggart is now the only one of this trio still alive, many readers may have the vague impression that he has nothing left to say. The peak of his fame came in the late Fifties and early Sixties, and his later writing has never achieved the same impact. By publishing an autobiography, the last volume of which appeared when he was ...”

“... the worse for knowing what is being said by the mob! This paragraph is dated all right: 1936. We may wince at Agate’s scorn for mincing and reflect that the hearty drill-sergeant reference lends support to James Harding’s portrait of Agate as a straight-acting gay, addicted to guardsmen. However, we now have some idea of Olivier’s effect upon the Old ...”