“... their mouths full’. A very tall man is writing a book about famous short people (‘Faulkner. William Faulkner. Tiny. Absolutely minuscule. Nearest thing to a homunculus. Made Truman Capote look like Steve Reeves’) and there is a splendid sequence concerning the after-effects of a vigorous game of squash on a well-preserved but stiffening older man ...”

“... between disagreement and disloyalty. But I think there is more to it. How do you get someone like William Barr, Trump’s attorney general, to torch their own reputation and suborn themselves to your will? The real question of the relationship between the mad king and his clever, upright ministers is not about the abuse that the ministers suffer, or the ...”

“... Enzo Rossi, protesting against the suspension of Jodi Dean, a professor of politics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, from her academic duties. In a blog post, Dean – a communist and anti-Zionist – had remarked of the early scenes from 7 October:Who could not feel energised seeing oppressed people bulldozing the fences enclosing them, taking to the ...”

“... kind’, which has been in use for well over a century. It is derived from John Stuart Mill and William Whewell, who both wrote of ‘kinds’, although the Cambridge logician John Venn may have been the first to use it in a work of philosophy. The term was intended to get rid of a lot of philosophical baggage, like the word ‘essence’; but that is never ...”

“... directed at the Surrealist Charles Henri Ford. Twenty years before Susan Sontag insisted that the camp sensibility had ‘hardly broken into print’, Duncan was arguing in print that the time for camp was over. In the name of gay rights, and in line with his universalist instincts, Duncan suggested that the appropriate ...”

“... queen angry … she could not rest until she had heard her sister’s voice in waking life.’Her camp followers – never was that phrase more apt – scarcely waited till she had left the room before they started bitching about her, usually in snobbish terms. The snobbery is equally distributed between left and right. Christopher Isherwood called her ...”

“... outright lies or convenient omissions. Matthew skipped out on his sister Jane’s wedding to William Forster of the landmark Education Act. Forster’s personal style was flat, but Matthew was also jealous of his political success. Still, he did not give his sister away – in the Lake Country ‘with the great fells standing sentinel’, as family ...”

“... sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless’. Matthew Arnold and William Morris thought their own engagement with Arthurian and Norse literature far superior to this tedious Teutonic competitor.But rivalry and resistance can also be modes of reception, and the most astute Wagnerians were those who grappled agonistically with ...”

“... drop-in shows in ways I could never have predicted. The rarely seen Vulcano, a film directed by William Dieterle in a Hollywood version of Italian neo-realism, achieved a lively, sell-out crowd, many of whom were around my own age and some of whom lived on the barren volcanic island invaded by the original film crew. Folk memories of the Roman diva Anna ...”

“... minutiae as though the future of civilisation depended on it. There’s a long letter to William Mann taking him to task for his misconception of the umlaut; and, in the LRB archive, a hilarious correspondence, from the early 1980s, between Keller and the editors, about the distinction between the colon and the semi-colon, the use of the dash, the ...”

“... Romantic philhellenism and the Grecian histories of politically active men of letters such as William Mitford, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, John Stuart Mill and George Grote.Relating the historical writing of 19th-century liberals and utilitarians to their political battles isn’t a new approach, and conceptually these are some of the least original parts of ...”

“... now was flavoured with the essences belonging to, for example, Peter Ackroyd, Anita Brookner, William Boyd, Anthony Burgess and Peter Hall. This is typical, alas. First repetition: Kenneth has left Paris, even though his father has promised to introduce him to the ‘agent who had forced Tsvetaeva’s husband to work for the GPU’. Kenneth prefers the ...”

“... over ten thousand deaths), it comes to seem probable that the geo-political opening undertaken by William Casey, McFarlane, North and company was nothing less than an attempted coup whose goal was either the fomenting of prolonged instability in Iran or the accession to power of some person or group less hostile to the US and Israel. The man publicly ...”

“... adulthood the reason why he is a walking disaster: at the age of eight he was sexually abused by a camp counsellor. Then there are Ron and Nancy’s own children: her daughter Patti writes an ‘unpleasant’ novel about the family, her son unexpectedly becomes a ballet dancer. Thankfully, Ron is just a regular guy: he hates tomatoes, loves macaroni, and ...”

“... commentary on Kant (a triple motion of change), Sir Thomas Nugent’s Montesquieu, a moment from William Morris’s Aeneid directly inspired by Beowulf, or a comparison ‘of the meshing of knowledge and intuition’ in six 20th-century translations of Matthew XXVI:30. Time and again, Kelly achieves unexpected but illuminating juxtapositions; he points to ...”