“... of literature and criticism through a better understanding of Emerson. Believing all may involve something close to a conversion. Believing none will do scant justice to the work of one of the most perceptive of contemporary critics. Compounding with half will please nobody. From The Comic Sense of Henry James (1960) through A World Elsewhere ...”

“... context for, but do not in any way extend, the preoccupations of the major books. Their importance may rather be that they make it hard to distinguish between the two Empsons, the white-coated technocrat and the plain man costumed in tweedy prejudices. They suggest that, far from shelving his prejudices when he turned to literature, Empson used those ...”

“... that amounts to a ‘fundamental breach of [the president’s] oath of office’. The best hope may be that the whistleblowers multiply to such an extent that popular imbecility is no match for their accumulated weight and direction. A casualty of the erratic progress of the impeachment may turn out to be the candidacy of ...”

“... Western Europe reaches one of its fine points here, like Cape Wrath in Sutherland, Lleyn and St David’s Head in Wales, and Cornuaille in Brittany. In such places we come across peaks and juts of rock which look and feel like those in West Penwith: ‘look’ because they draw our eyes and feet like magnets, ‘feel’ because the whitish crystals of ...”

“... the BBC when Alan Yentob insisted that an aristocratic ex-Battle of Britain pilot be played by David Jason; ITV loved it, but made similar demands. Eventually, back at the BBC, the play got its perfect casting – Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay and Joanna Lumley – and was ‘bought’ in 1998 by the then BBC2 controller Mark Thompson for broadcast at ...”

“... say he were a simple man, but none of us can say that any more.’ There are, as these passages may have made apparent, two voices muttering in the shadows behind Kennaway’s prose, and they are the Old Firm of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. You can hear Hemingway grumbling in the rhythm of the faux-naif opening; it could be Colonel Cantwell muttering to ...”

“... and to ask that Congress pass his Justice for Victims of Sanctuary Cities Act. The Democrats may well vote against it, but that will be a painful and uneasy case to make. Trump is putting himself across as the leader who cares for all the lives worth caring for. The day after the speech, the Senate acquitted President Trump of the two charges the ...”

“... all seething in the plasma, like underwater creatures, like the weird subterranean species that may be shapes in the water for the aghast Thai boys as they are drawn through caves measureless to man, inhaling and imagining they are breathing and staying alive. We were dead ...”

“... of God’ early last century. The landscape painters in American Sublime (at Tate Britain until 19 May) believed, as most people did, that the Earth was God’s creation and that its bones, its visible crust, were ‘a Book of Revelations in the rock-leaved Bible of geology’. Those were the words of the pioneering geologist John Wesley Powell, who led the ...”

“... conceit that he can destroy the Iranian regime by a method short of war; on the other hand, Trump may actually be tempted by the promise of military action in Venezuela, where the US can show its muscle quickly and with impunity.With these new advisers, Trump is more thoroughly committed to war than he may have realised ...”

“... criminality’. The word ‘sheer’ did most of the work: the cause of criminality, Theresa May was arguing, was criminality itself. Boris Johnson was quick to agree. When did it become a test of ideological purity to be able to say with a straight face that poverty and unemployment have nothing to do with the causes of crime? Who was the first ...”

“... of a guillotine blade terminates any simple-minded reveries. The constant flow of objurgation may have functioned as a relief from the mental pressure of it all, but if so, the reprieve was temporary. In December 1966 he hit rock bottom. He was ‘extraordinarily depressed’, unable to get up in the morning, condemned by his ‘outsider’ status to ...”

“... to the way things are, they simply want to be free to drift along with their fate. All this makes David Cameron a classic democratic fatalist, rather than the pragmatist he likes to present himself as. He certainly behaved like one when he exercised his veto in Brussels. The definition of a pragmatic conservative is someone who wants things to change so that ...”

“... the marshlands between the Tigris and the Euphrates, the camp is now abandoned and looted, but in May 2005 it was a busy centre of military operations. Amara has seen many reversals of fortune and opinion: it was once a hideout for anti-Saddam insurgents, whom he punished by draining the marshes. He also killed many of them, and buried their bodies in mass ...”

“... everything revolves around their particular whims and inclinations, and by stamping on rivals who may be getting above themselves. Margaret Thatcher was such a prime minister, but so too was Edward Heath, perhaps to an even greater extent (Heath’s cabinet was composed almost entirely of admirers and minions), which goes to show that dominance does not ...”