“... Financial Times he called the number of Old Etonians at Number 10 ‘preposterous’, following Jo Johnson’s promotion to head of the Policy Unit. Always in the background lurked Gove’s friend and adviser Cummings, whom Cameron suspected of whispering poison into his master’s ear. Things finally came to a head in 2016, when Gove went to see Cameron and ...”

“... has its roots in the New Critics’ preoccupation with the metaphysical poets, and what Samuel Johnson called their yoking together of heterogeneous ideas by violence, but it also reflects the attitudes of someone trained to believe that bread is flesh and God. Donoghue’s main claims are that metaphor ‘invokes things disgracefully far apart’ and that ...”

“... is fine. Indeed, ‘we might see Bloom as a proper hero of sexual modernity for, since Masters and Johnson, masturbation has become a familiar index of sexual normality, or, as one historian puts it, “the ultimate criterion of correct social behaviour”.’ (The historian, I learn a hundred pages later, is ...”

“... rather than present self-loathing. He might have added that for the supposedly anti-fleshly St Paul, it is the sexual coupling of bodies which symbolises the relationship between Christ and his people, and that in Christian tradition celibacy is meant to be a sacrifice. Since it is no sacrifice to surrender what you regard as worthless, Christian ascetism ...”

“... treatise on sheep management, The Fleece. The essay on language centres on the views of Samuel Johnson, but the periphery takes more pages, and is concerned with Lowth, Priestley and the anonymous ‘Brightland Grammar’, works which will be not much read again. No one is going to accuse this writer of populism or of mere propaganda. In the chapter called ...”

“... The abyss of history​ is deep enough to hold us all,’ Paul Valéry wrote in 1919, as Europe lay in ruins. The words resonate today as the coronavirus blows the roof off the world, most brutally exposing Britain and the United States, these prime movers of modern civilisation, which proudly claimed victory in two world wars, and in the Cold War, and which until recently held themselves up as exemplars of enlightened progress, economic and cultural models to be imitated across the globe ...”

“... whom he appeared (as Auden once succinctly put it) ‘a most bleak old bore’. The distinction of Paul Hamilton’s formidable new book, Metaromanticism, is the success with which it translates these Romantic predicaments into contemporary terms, so as to make them feel wholly up-to-date. The subject is properly convoluted and Hamilton’s prose is not shy of ...”

“... In Britain, Margaret Thatcher, a scientist, was a rare exception; far more typical is Boris Johnson, who likes to quote great chunks of Ancient Greek from memory.In his original and engrossing book, the Oxford historian Paul Betts, an American who experienced ‘Western Civ’ at first hand, perhaps underplays the ...”

“... Sidney’s Arcadia was now judged frivolous, and its political content was lost to view. Dr Johnson, on reading Lycidas, was shocked to find ‘trifling fictions mingled with the most sacred and awful truths.’ The word ‘truth’ was in any case changing in usage. Renaissance poets had promised ‘truth’, but now it was widely understood to be the ...”

“... else is going on. Take the satire. In The Closed Circle it turns out that The Rotters’ Club’s Paul Trotter, who at the age of nine was a precocious admirer of Mrs Thatcher and a rabid free-marketeer, has grown up to become a New Labour MP. Spot on, perhaps, as a characterisation of the Blairite hidden agenda. But this is where the satire ends: ...”

“... parties (he used to donate smaller amounts of money to the Tories, especially under Boris Johnson). Delo was one of the founders of the crypto exchange BitMEX, and in 2022 was convicted in the US for failing to implement adequate anti-money laundering safeguards at the company – prosecutors described him as the ‘leader of a criminal ...”

“... His most political moment occurs in a slightly apologetic digression on the life and work of Paul de Man. As everybody knows, de Man’s most notorious wartime article argued that to tidy the Jews away somewhere – say, into ‘a Jewish colony isolated from Europe’ – would not be much of a loss to European culture; and commentators have rightly been ...”

“... here, but it is for her association with Yeats that she is now remembered. A cousin of Lionel Johnson, she was married to the much older, and apparently very dull, Hope Shakespear. Yeats met Olivia at a Yellow Book dinner in 1894. He was 29, she a couple of years older. The nervous hesitations preceding their affair, which terminated the poet’s ...”

“... the difference between friendly and unfriendly racial discrimination. To echo Justice John Paul Stevens, who in a case in 1995 pointed out the difference between a ‘No Trespassing’ sign and a welcome mat, there is certainly a moral distinction – and there should be a legal distinction – between a sign that says ‘Blacks get out!’ and one ...”

“... the ear with some splendid novelty than awaken those ideas that slumber in the heart’ – Samuel Johnson, who in a page or two of unanswerable analysis clarifies the reasons why a poet whom he both loved and respected could not conceal ‘the difficulty which he found in exhibiting the genuine operations of the heart’. The key word is ...”