“... learned book, as in much of his other writing, he is the only one in step. Bernard’s title means what it says: this is not a biography. And it is not about Henrician politics in general. Surprisingly, Bernard deals hardly at all with the fall and execution of Anne Boleyn. Some have seen Anne’s active interest in evangelical religious reform, and in ...”

“... Unionists as parochial know-nothings. Revisionist historians, most prominently Ian McBride and David Livingstone, have demonstrated that the history of Ulster Presbyterianism from the 18th century is characterised by intellectual richness, an openness to science, a commitment to progress and a taste for theological heterodoxy, notwithstanding backwoods ...”

“... that drinking is the other half of life: it’s more fundamental than that. It’s what Nietzsche means when he discusses the ascetic ideals: the ideals of self-denial destroy creativity, power, even sex. These are the ‘last men’, the nihilists, the hopeless ones: Vladimir and Estragon without their sense of irony. They read the 12 Traditions, they say ...”

“... no city should be so large that a man could not walk out of it in a morning. London, while by no means on a par with the megacities of the emergent East or Africa, still takes a very long day to egress on foot: if you leave at around 7 a.m., and are reasonably fit, you may find yourself in open fields late that evening. Following Connolly, what this says ...”

“... in poor countries: ‘What shall cause thee to understand what is the Bank?’ he asked. ‘It means the complete handing over of the reins of government to the enemy of Islam, the enslaving of the people to that enemy, the surrendering of them and of all dominion and authority into the hands of the foreign foe.’ Al-Afghani may have been ...”

“... question. Kermode invites us to pause over the elaborate social coding of Annan’s description of David Eccles as ‘a Wykehamist with the manner (so Etonians said) of a Harrovian’ – but also over the blunter evocation of Richard Hoggart as ‘the grammar school extramural lecturer’. Our Age had its traditions, ‘was a gentleman’, as Kermode ...”

“... day. Civilisation doesn’t eliminate human impulses: it tames them, through changing their means of expression. That, I decided straight away, would have to be the serious story under the paragraphs that tied the clips together: otherwise the commentary would be doomed never to rise above the level of condescension. Strong anecdote potential, a flash ...”

“... book will undoubtedly become the standard account of the Russian aspect of the Napoleonic wars. David Bell has recently argued that Napoleon introduced ‘total war’ to Europe. Following the 1789 Revolution, all male Frenchmen, on reaching a certain age, were called up as citizens to the armed forces. As a result of the levée en masse the French army ...”

“... don’t lose their passport in the process. Rodgers goes on to address the Marxist arguments of David Harvey and Fredric Jameson, which hold that postmodern cultural fragmentation is connected to the shift from the Fordist national economies of the first part of the 20th century to the post-Fordist global economy of the last part. In the Marxist view, the ...”

“... William Ferguson. But if the softer, gentler Trevor-Roper outlived many – though by no means all – of his foremost adversaries, their pupils and heirs had not forgotten the scars borne by the previous generation. In his battle with Trevor-Roper over matters of recusant history, the ‘convert-novelist’ Evelyn Waugh had offered some barbed ...”

“... his book about censorship: not just dishonour but the question whether the term still means anything. It’s important too to see that in spite of the high moral tone of many speakers in these works, Coetzee is staging an argument, not trying to win one or even, finally, to assert one. He uses fiction to think with, and in Elizabeth Costello the ...”

“... to Israel’s National Water Carrier. Israel declared that this would be an attack on one of its means of livelihood and would be construed as a threat to peace; the Arab scheme, they claimed, denied Israel’s right to exist. At the Alexandria Summit in September 1964, by which time Israel had already begun test pumpings on the first stage of the National ...”

“... the Cold (1963). ‘It could,’ he said, ‘be turned into an opera.’ Le Carré – that is, David Cornwell, an ex-spy – once said that he entered the secret world ‘in the spirit of John Buchan and left it in the spirit of Kafka’; allowing for quite a lot of exaggeration at both ends, it’s a reasonable comment on The Spy who Came in from the ...”

“... of them – with severe respect. Better than anyone else, they know that a work of art means more than its creator intended it to mean, that artworks live what Montale called ‘the second life of art’ with their readers. But their criticism, spoken or written, tends to hug authorial intention rather closely; and writers, in my experience, are ...”

“... wars in less than six decades and still does not have peace agreements with all of its neighbours means that people live with the feeling of constant threat. This feeling, justified or not, has made Israeli decision-makers very cautious in negotiation and loath to change the political status quo, whence, as Weizman shows, the need to reach agreements granting ...”