“... particular intensity such conflicts assumed amid the democratic ethos of Jacksonian America, but Alexander Welsh has advanced a related argument about Dickens, another 19th-century male writer deeply implicated in a narrative of the artist’s self-making. What might once have looked like both novelists’ participation in universally Oedipal themes has ...”

“... of natural law over all human law, and for that reason his many American readers – including Alexander Hamilton – took him to be a supporter of resistance, upholding the ‘inherent (though latent) powers of society, which no climate, not time, no constitution, no contract, can ever destroy or diminish’. Even Edmund Burke thought that Blackstone had ...”

“... foe, and ran the drama happily through in his mind. A few weeks later the newsreels showed King Alexander of Yugoslavia being mown down by a Croatian assassin on exactly that spot. ‘I felt oddly guilty, but also pleased. In the Mediterranean sunshine there were strange and violent men with whom I could identify, and with whom, in a way, I was now in ...”

“... to live with my aunt in Essex. After leaving Patrick, I went to live with a writer called Michael Alexander who took me to Afghanistan. Several ‘engagements’ (author’s inverted commas) on and she is living with Johnnie, but he wanted a child of his own before Patrick returned to live with them. So ‘when my aunt brought Patrick to the London flat, our ...”

“... their history when they cherish the Promethean illusion that they are making it’). Anticipating Alexander Zinoviev, he observed that in the Soviet Union ‘le style de la déstalinisation est resté stalinien.’ Was it just for lack of inclination that he never worked out the implications of these and similar insights? It seems more likely that he lacked ...”

“... a distinguished collection of essays on one Stuart minister who advanced British hegemony – Peter Lake urges historians not to link Early Modern crises ‘directly to contemporary concerns about Northern Ireland, the union with Scotland and the European union’. It strikes me that Lake devalues the past, though, when he plays down its connections with ...”

“... rejected by impercipient academics, who preferred a Chair of Medicine, the impact in Scotland of Peter Ramus’s Paris-based assault on Rhetoric helped prise open a chink through which literary criticism could eventually squeeze. Bernard Lamy’s L’Art de parler(1675, translated 1676) signals an important transitional stage in the process, for by the time ...”

“... Row suits, could easily be a real-life counterpart of Dorothy L. Sayers’s fictional sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. (It’s a nice touch that the affair gets a mention in her 1935 detective novel Gaudy Night. Wimsey himself had clearly been following it keenly.) The dishevelled, corduroy-clad communist Pollard has more than a whiff of Le Carré about him: in one ...”

“... that Jefferson had simply been wrong, a conviction made plain by Confederate vice president Alexander H. Stephens in his ‘cornerstone speech’ of 1861, which insisted that inequality, not equality, was a ‘law of nature’ and the foundation of social order. Another expression of this revised Myth of the Founding could be found in the Supreme ...”

“... about the constitution, but to worry more generally about the democratic adequacy of humanity’ (Peter Sloterdijk). ‘Brexit shows that the Brussels bureaucracy, that alleged monster that employs no more civil servants than a central German city administration, has done a great job. The extent of interconnectedness at all levels has to be ...”

“... Veyne’s Le Pain et le Cirque,2 an analysis of civic giving in Classical Antiquity; the second Alexander Zinoviev’s The Yawning Heights,3 a satirical and penetrating work about politics and everyday life in the Soviet Union. Veyne is, in my view, the greatest French historian now writing. I believe that his work will come to achieve the same status as ...”

“... theatre’. Sometimes Prokofiev’s way of doing things fitted perfectly in the Soviet context. Peter and the Wolf, composed to a libretto featuring Soviet Young Pioneers written by Prokofiev himself, was one of the great successes of his early Moscow years; his music for Eisenstein’s film Alexander Nevsky was ...”

“... did Chagall really belong ‘among the very great artists of our time’, as the museum curator Peter Selz thought, or was he, as Arthur Danto puts it, ‘overproductive, repetitive and shallow’? Naive, or a self-consciously calculating opportunist? The canny ‘manager of his own fairyland’ (Jean Cassou), or a painter who carefully cultivated his image ...”

“... travelling in Italy with her parents; he was the family’s doctor in Rome. They had two children, Peter and Malcolm, and remained technically married until his death in 1949, though they spent very little time together and he saw almost nothing of his sons as they were growing up. ‘There seems to have been no question of passionate love on Axel’s ...”

“... Light in August. In the months that followed, these were joined by a number of Rothkos and Alexander Calder’s Orange Fish. The curators had been instructed to purchase art from Impressionism to the present day, so they acquired Monet’s Giverny haystacks, village and garden scenes by Pissarro and Vuillard, Toulouse-Lautrec portraits, paintings by ...”