“... despite all this, The Spirit Level does contain a powerful political message. It is impossible to read it and not to be impressed by how often greater equality appears to be the answer, whatever happens to be the question. It provides a connection between what otherwise look like disparate social problems. Wilkinson and Pickett make this point clearly: The ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of 1919. Nick Lloyd dismisses these protests as whipped up by ignorant agitators who hadn’t even read the act. I should have thought that the label on the tin would give you a pretty good idea of what was in it. It was against the Rowlatt Act that Gandhi led his first nationwide satyagraha, or ‘soul-force’, in India, after practising this tactic of civil ...”

“... high-spirited comedy, Crampton Hodnet, set among scholars, spinsters and clergy. The agent who read it thought the story and its characters tame. ‘Can you imagine an old spinster,’ Pym wrote to friends, ‘frowning anxiously over her MS, trying to be more wicked?’Pym was 37 and still single when a much-revised version of her roman-à-clef was finally ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in 1907 converted to Lutheranism; he doesn’t seem to have taken his baptism very seriously. Well-read in contemporary Hungarian and Western literature and immensely ambitious to contribute to literary and cultural history in the footsteps of Wilhelm Dilthey, the young man was active in a circle around Endre Ady, the greatest Hungarian poet of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... pressure from his aides – Trump finally denounced white supremacists as ‘evil’ in a speech read off a teleprompter, he sounded like a little boy forced to eat his spinach, or to rat on his friends. No president has been so easily flattered, so thrilled by the sight of his own name, which his advisers include in policy memos in order to hold his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... resulted in a small goldmine of sources in the National Archives, well exploited by Braddick as by Richard Evans in his biography of Hill’s comrade, Eric Hobsbawm. In this respect, biographers of leading left-wing figures have an advantage that those who write about less suspect individuals can only envy.Khrushchev’s revelations in February 1956 about the ...”

“... of the non-combatant Lawrence to complain while thousands of his compatriots fell in France. But Richard Aldington felt that Lawrence never recovered from the banning of The Rainbow, and Kinkead-Weekes follows him by placing this event at the centre of his narrative. The judge ruled that there was ‘no justification whatever for the perpetration of such a ...”

“... actually did. There are, of course, other books with pictures of his work; and this book is best read with at least one of those at hand. Rawsthorn’s emphasis on realms other than the visual is certainly right for this complex story. It’s mildly annoying, however, when her fashion summations are too pat and moralistic, and it’s a little more so when ...”