“... here: you can’t simply say that inequality means we are all suffering together. Instead, it may mean that the poor are doing so badly that the rich aren’t interested in looking at the wider picture. They are focused on making sure they don’t wind up poor. This is why the difference between ‘almost everyone’ and ‘everyone on average’ matters ...”

“... on coded language that everyone understands but which can be plausibly denied. Cruz and Hatch may have been distressed by Trump’s response to Charlottesville, but neither of them objects to his policies on race, which amount to the most aggressive assault on civil rights since the Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965. His attorney general, Jeff ...”

“... play, The Sad Shepherd, for her monograph on Shakespeare’s great rival. Given this history, it may seem surprising that The Shakespearean Forest is not a longer book, but Barton became almost blind as a result of macular degeneration and was forced to abandon her work. When she died in 2013 it remained incomplete and its publication has been a labour of ...”

“... Faulkner reread it every year. Joyce talked about its ‘unforgettable scenes … Madness, you may call it’ – but that was the secret of its ‘genius’. Philosophers were crazy for it too. Wittgenstein, who had read it ‘an extraordinary number of times’, went around quoting bits to friends. Heidegger kept a portrait of Dostoevsky on his ...”

“... expulsion orders, 25 registration orders and ten prohibition orders were made, and by the end of May 1940, a total of 167 expulsion orders had been made, statistics which ignore the substantial emigration of the Irish from Britain following the Act. Originally due to expire on 28 July 1941, it was kept in force until the end of that year under wartime powers ...”

“... more devious and ruthless – and certainly more hypocritical – than either Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon. Both Reeves and Beschloss show the risks Kennedy took in his liaisons, which exposed him to blackmail, not least by his own FBI head, J. Edgar Hoover. During the Second World War Kennedy became involved with someone with Nazi sympathies, while as ...”

“... confess to ignorance about the mood of ordinary citizens in August 1914. Those who marched to war may also have had illusions, but these were soon brutally shattered. How did they cope, why did they continue, what did it all mean to them, what did it do to their patriotism, their religion, their views about authority, their politics and social or class ...”

“... by Pushkin’s Boris Godunov. Like Rybakov, Voinovich has been overtaken by events: whatever may be the end-result of the Gorbachovshchina, for the moment the progress towards a grey, featureless socialist future seems to have been halted, and what might have been a reasonable bet in the days of Brezhnev or Andropov now appears to be very much of a long ...”

“... proportionately, as in the European armies and I found myself remembering from The Last Enemy Richard Hillary’s friend Noel Agazarian, shot down in his Spitfire in 1940. The death in action of already well-known writers like Charles Péguy and Alain-Fournier seems like an accident: it is the younger ones who have the besoin de la fatalité, and are ...”

“... Ariès’s contribution to historical knowledge, however.) The other contemporary historian is Richard Cobb. For once, I am one up on him, for he rates only a single entry. Admittedly, it is a marvellous passage, his reflections on the suicides recorded in Box D4U17 in the Archives de la Seine, the dossiers of the morgue in the old Châtelet of Paris from ...”

“... in the light of the general argument advanced by Margot Heinemann in Puritanism and Theatre, it may be that we should also regard it as the quite natural response of a man less committed than Jonson to the royalist or ‘court’ party. Shakespeare had at least one patron (William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke) with substantial Puritan affiliations. He ...”

“... of a theory to be found readily enough, in several forms, as in Stevens, Empson, Blackmur, and Richard Poirier. Poirier’s A World Elsewhere is a typology of American literature consistent with the acceptance of Emerson as its prophet. Empson didn’t write a theory of American literature, but he thought James’s later style distinctively American in ...”

“... constrain the individual: history, imperial grandeur, Classicism, high culture – even villages. (Richard Hofstadter once explained how the ceaseless lure of land inhibited the growth of village settlements and led to the habit of continually pulling up stakes.) Repeatedly, in diaries, journals, letters, ‘official’ histories, promotional tracts and works ...”

“... who, according to a tradition Hughes doesn’t mention, ‘died a papist’ – the insight may not be original but it needs restating forcibly in a culture where Shakespeare is so often treated as a piece of Anglican heritage or as a second-rate Tory dramatist. It’s an applied insight which gains authority not just from the active excitement of ...”

“... family, as in: ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’ (Richard Pevear/Larissa Volokhonsky). The implied proposition is that happy families are not much use to a novelist, and the next sentence confirms this view. ‘All was confusion in the Oblonskys’ house.’ Very promising. Throughout his life Vladimir Nabokov ...”