“... with easy pleasures and made … playgoers work harder than they had ever worked before’. Citing John Aubrey’s image of a reclusive playwright who was never ‘a company keeper’, Shapiro insists that the business of biography is not to attempt to recover ‘Shakespeare in love’ but rather to discover ‘Shakespeare at work’. As its recasting of ...”

“... the revival of liberal political philosophy in the United States in the 1960s, and his reviews of John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin remain some of the most acute there are. But these philosophers started from within. They may have been prompted to write by the establishment of civil rights in the 1960s and the domestic consequences of the Vietnam War, but these ...”

“... they can just as well stand in place of one. Deliverology allowed Blair to follow his whims, which took him all over the map. What it didn’t do was force him to face up to his weaknesses as a politician. These included a lack of historical perspective and a craven inability to face down Gordon Brown. When Blair met a barrier in the way of something he wanted ...”

“... sour memoir by A.N. Wilson from which even the concept of kindness appears to be absent. What with John Bayley’s Iris and the film of it, and all the ‘coo wasn’t she a one’ coverage of her sex life, she has had too much press as the novelist who did a lot of shagging and then lost her marbles to be given an entirely fair trial for at least another ...”

“... palace in a fuck-you show of force.The F-35 is the most expensive weapon ever built. Israel took delivery of its first two exemplars a month before the Mezzeh raid, and it’s worth bearing in mind that no one with any knowledge of how air forces operate thinks it’s remotely likely that the IAF would have risked its new baby so soon, and on such a ...”

“... catching the light in a different way, or note the yellow tunic of the figure I supposed to be St John with what felt like fresh, or better, vision. I wondered if the new emptiness that had fallen on the city had somehow added clarity to the art. As a good Catholic, I like the Crucifixion; indeed, I prefer it to the Resurrection, which always seems a bit too ...”

“... the body of Dick Double-Crossman, Classical don with political flair, Favoured of fortune he yet took a toss when Out with the hounds, he ran with the hare. This was widely quoted; and quoted because it came often to mind rather than, as Howard implies, because his name happened to lend itself to the joke. In spite of his declared friendship and admiration ...”

“... feel I should leave, but I see from the correspondence that the insurmountable problem, because I took it to be symptomatic, was my inability to convince Rosenthal that you simply cannot do an exhibition called ‘American Art in the 20th Century’ without including at least one of Arshile Gorky’s portraits or double portraits of the Thirties (and, if ...”

“... Foucault, closely followed, as we shall see, by Presidents Reagan and Bush, Margaret Thatcher and John Major. The heroes are – well, Derrida, of course, but above all Noam Chomsky, here exalted especially because of his sturdily rationalist opposition to Foucault, in an exchange on Dutch Television in the early Seventies about the location of political ...”

“... two, talking about giving peace a chance. A self-satisfied Labour councillor wearing a CND badge. John Berger, the star guest, putting his usual spin on the dishonest line of the Communist Party. No doubt there was a resolution to send a telegram to Downing Street. There was also, I dare say for the sake of ‘unity’, a pro-Chinese speaker (for some reason ...”

“... extensive knowledge. When he wants to tell us what a good scholar Housman was, he quotes the late John Carter’s comment on the testimonials supplied by various scholars when Housman was candidate for the Chair of Latin at University College, London. ‘Perhaps only those conversant with the trades-union of Academe,’ wrote Carter, ‘can appreciate to the ...”

“... cradle of the Thirties, the Hotel Foyot in Paris, was demolished in 1937.) The cradle-robber also took his youth, for Roth looked and felt old practically all his life: ‘like a thousand-year-old man returning from Beyond,’ he once said. Last but not least, the cradle episode prefigures his relationships with women: in his life and in his books, their ...”

“... of the previous generation, he or she might well have mentioned, alongside Darwin and John Stuart Mill, the name of Sir Henry Maine, the subject of Karuna Mantena’s valuable new study. His name isn’t heard much anymore, but in his own day Maine (1822-88) was regarded as a towering public intellectual. He became regius professor of civil law at ...”

“... Oxfordshire and Bloomsbury, where Philipps was colonised by the Stracheys: Lytton was his mentor, John got him into left-wing politics, and at various points he was in analysis with James and in bed with Julia. Philipps’s father funded him while he tried to develop a career as a painter, but even by the lowish standards of Bloomsbury he was a terrible ...”

“... who rubbed the brass of Sir Edward Grey for the Staffordshire volume.So as the series developed it took on some of the colouring of the local antiquarian tradition. It was a successor not only to Dehio but also to Britton and Brayley’s early 19th-century series, The Beauties of England and Wales, which is sometimes cited in the texts. Pevsner on occasion ...”