“... change.’Views, in fact, become the substance of the narrative, which is governed by a series of more or less conscious choices or avoidance manoeuvres on the part of its protagonists. Catton has said that her work on Jane Austen’s Emma (she wrote the screenplay for the 2020 film adaptation) influenced Birnam Wood’s structure: it emulates the Austen mode ...”

“... thousand people attending his funeral in Belfast. One week later, Francis Hughes died, and eight more men – Patsy O’Hara, Raymond McCreesh, Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson, Kevin Lynch, Kieran Doherty, Thomas McElwee and Michael Devine – starved themselves to death in the months that followed. During that summer of ...”

“... world centred on what he called ‘poetic knowledge’, which regarded imagination and instinct as more important than the cold rationalism of ‘scientific knowledge’. Everything he did he saw as poetry: ‘The creation of a road, a school, a nursery – that’s poetry!’ His writing combines earnestness with a rigorous anti-sentimentalism and a love of ...”

“... scheme; they are apparently not in danger of being blown off an empirical, descriptive course as more elaborately constructed or more didactic novels might be. Nabokov’s sneer about using novels as evidence about society is misplaced: novels do contain veridical information about a non-problematic reality. The rawest ...”

“... in particular must have given many a happy hour to rhetoricians since his works were exhumed, in a more innocent spirit, by Lamb and his contemporaries. It is in this essay that Empson first puts in a decisive appearance. Seven Types of Ambiguity is one of the few first-class critical works of the century; it has changed the way in which even people who do not ...”

“... present century. Devotion to the legislature on this heroic scale has a predictable appeal for the more serious-minded of its personnel. The project was championed in the past by Harold Macmillan and is protected now by the enthusiasm of men such as Roy Jenkins and Robert Rhodes James. But why should those of us who are excluded from this desirable club at ...”

“... Familiarity,​ oddly enough, is all too often an obstacle to historical understanding. The more we think we know about a period, the more preconceptions we have. In the case of the Napoleonic Wars, a patriotic mythology fixated on the achievements of Nelson, Wellington and Sir John Moore at Corunna tends to filter out fear and uncertainty in favour of a seemingly inevitable procession of victories ...”

“... Ernst, an architect and the youngest son of Sigmund Freud. Over the next five or six years, more members of the family, including Sigmund himself, came to England, where their papers were organised by Marie Bonaparte, who put in a good word with the Duke of Kent. Four of Sigmund’s sisters stayed behind in Vienna and perished in the concentration ...”

“... makes me wish I were writing about the work of Fulke Greville or Sir Walter Ralegh or Sir Thomas Wyatt. I studied English and History. In English we were told almost immediately by Seamus Deane that we must bring nothing of ourselves, of our personal experience to a poem when we read. A poem was a verbal structure, and our job was to define the nature ...”

“... of the Cold War in domestic politics. Truman’s loyalty programme would eventually trigger more than 500 dismissals and more than 2600 resignations, losses that weakened the mental power and competence of the civil service for decades to come. It took Eisenhower, a less anxious president, to revoke the order in April ...”

“... friend and antagonist, exact contemporary and truest counterpart, was Ernst Bloch, who took the more familiar path through Paris and Prague, and in 1938 sailed for New York. Bloch’s speech ‘Zerstörte Sprache – Zerstörte Kultur’ – delivered to the Association of German Writers in New York in 1939, and published in Moscow that same year – ended ...”

“... exhibition in Washington DC. At the heart of the row was something that will figure even more powerfully next year, in the various commemorations of the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage to the New World: how much should Europe’s conquest of the Americas, as treated today in exhibitions and commemorations, reflect the experience of the ...”

“... British universities cease to be able to attract foreign scholars or to retain many of their own more adventurous lecturers, there is a risk that solemn intransigence of this kind will increase. All communities under intense attack from without are susceptible to dogma, to heresy-hunts, to seeking refuge in the wrong kind of certainties. British history ...”

“... a personal as well as a political message. By the time of the next election it is now no more than an evens bet that there will not be a new Archbishop installed in the chair of St Augustine. Dr Runcie’s own time as the 102nd Archbishop of Canterbury is, in fact, drawing – if not especially peacefully – towards its close. Since, unlike his ...”

“... then, at Norwich on 21 August, Elizabeth was for the first time publicly celebrated (by the poet Thomas Churchyard) as a Virgin Queen. The significance of this little piece of provincial theatre, a proposal not to marry, relates to the master-card in the 1578 strategy of appeasement: a royal match with the French King’s brother, Francois, Duke of Anjou. It ...”