“... with literary education that he can offer only purely negative reasons why anyone should want to read or teach Shakespeare: the Right do it so the Left must do it too. Unfortunately this rationale may be a shaky one given that some sections of the Right are starting to attack literary education as giving the lower orders ideas above their station. Political ...”

“... dated) contorted with guilt and indignation over the romantic delusions of Occidentalism. Having read The Race Gallery I feel retrospective embarrassment at my own ignorance. It was meant only as counterfactual musing. But some readers must have known that there already are commentators given to fulmination about pigmental challenge and the inherent defects ...”

“... Independence that broke out in 1919, as later nationalist piety would insist. It is startling to read, in Charles Townshend’s fine study, The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) leader, John O’Leary who, in Yeats’s poem, shared his grave with the corpse of ‘romantic Ireland’, observing that the ...”

“... In​ August and September 1990, Richard Sale, a lieutenant colonel from the Light Infantry regiment of the British army, toured the UK and West Germany – then just months away from reunification – with a primitive Zenith Supersport laptop. Sale had commanded a company, some 120 men, in Northern Ireland in the early 1980s and later a battalion of 650 ...”

“... from sleeping with his sister-in-law to leaving slices of bacon between the pages of the books he read at breakfast. Return to Yesterday, first published in 1931, is a memoir of literary life in England in the Late Victorian and Edwardian eras. It begins in 1891, with Ford immersed in Kipling’s ‘Only a Subaltern’, on a train in Sussex; and ends at a ...”

“... and then into an internationally recognised and traded commodity. Camembert is a gripping read, and if it winds up using cheese as a perspicuous site for understanding the making of modernity, well, there are lots of other cheese books which really are just about cheese. If you’re going to make a coherent case that an authentic local product has ...”

“... Nitze, Kennan’s hawkish successor as director of policy planning, produced a paper that could be read in two minutes. Nitze’s crisp, technocratic belligerence was the future. Kennan, Gaddis writes, ‘had become prophetic but no longer relevant’, at least not to policymaking. Still, he could not resist when Acheson offered him the ambassadorship to the ...”

“... The Family Idiot, and of Beauvoir’s America Day by Day; Lydia Davis, a translator of Proust; or Richard Sieburth, translator of Leiris, Michaux and Nerval. Instead, the publishers chose Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, two Americans who have lived in Paris since the 1960s and worked as English teachers at the Institut d’Etudes ...”

“... and the early years of the 20th century there were several related attempts, by writers such as Richard Jefferies and Edward Thomas, to identify ‘England’ with ‘the countryside’ (largely for an urban readership), while the interwar decades tended to throw up more quizzical searches for ‘the real England’, assumed to have been submerged by the ...”

“... income, excluding temporary effects from the downturn. The first point in their economic policy read as follows: ‘We will safeguard Britain’s credit rating with a credible plan to eliminate a large part of the structural deficit over a Parliament.’ How? It’s on the next page: ‘We will cut government spending to bring the deficit down and restore ...”

“... commentators. Amid the clamour for retribution, Zakaria sounded calm and judicious. Read now, however, his article seems notable mostly for its evasions: he was careful not to say anything that might get him stigmatised as a radical. Blaming the Arabs for their failure to modernise, he didn’t mention the American obsession with energy ...”

“... the autumn, Lord Hutton listened with great politeness to a very great deal of evidence, and read even more, on issues that he had already – or soon would – entirely put out of his mind. With its terms of reference construed in this way, the report was bound to be somewhat favourable to government and somewhat critical of the BBC. The authorities ...”

“... neutralists make substantial moral claims. To defend the two-face schema, Gray could say, echoing Richard Rorty, that there’s the bit where neutralists say it, and then there’s the bit where they take it back. ‘It’ here is the neutralists’ claim that they avoid controversial moral ideals. But then they take this claim back, relying on a moral ideal ...”

“... repressive figure of Joachim – though it does help one to understand the shock-waves caused by Richard Strauss, rocking the boat with solecisms, crudities, reckless infringements of instrumental propriety, general vulgarity and callowness, and troubling Tovey the chaste grammarian and self-appointed guardian of the sacred Teutonic flame. (But he doesn’t ...”

“... and advertisements, and trying to master the finances of printing and distribution. At night he read Joseph Conrad and other classic authors, and after midnight spoke for hours on the telephone with his father about politics, history and the stock markets.’ Once he made it to the big leagues via his adventures with Argus, Black began to expand his ...”