“... dissent. The possibilities of social protest were far greater than before, but there was still a strong psychological barrier against its conversion into political opposition. The ‘good king, bad advisers’ idea retained a surprising currency. This view is broadly confirmed by Marifeli Pérez-Stable, who, in The Cuban Revolution, concludes that the Cuban ...”

“... left grandchildren. Those who became our ancestresses in each generation were lucky, and strong, and able unconsciously to balance their children’s welfare against their own. A mother who squandered the resources needed to maintain her own health would be quickly weeded out – and her family would probably follow her into oblivion. On top of ...”

“... civilisation is superior to that of the Celts ... the weight of popular admiration, and indeed a strong sense of identification, has been attached to the Roman occupiers of Britain rather than to the native British.’ The Romans, though invaders, had the merit of not being Celts. The Roman Empire worked as a psychic forebear to the British Empire: a noble ...”

“... with Margaret Adams, the well-to-do music student who would become his first wife. Ambition and strong recommendations won Taylor a teaching post at Manchester in 1930, where he wrote his first books on Continental diplomacy, began reviewing for the Guardian, played a minor part in local Labour politics, and (cushioned by his investments and his wife’s ...”

“... do with Jews, and even less with the tenets of Judaism. My own great-great-great-great grandfather Simon Lévy, who came from Lorraine and served as rabbi of Bordeaux from 1864 to 1886, missed the point in his response to Drumont, Moïse, Jésus et Mahomet (1887). Lévy’s book stressed the common ethics of the three great monotheistic religions. With his ...”

“... of Teju Cole’s books, Open City or Every Day Is for the Thief, has seniority. Open City made a strong impression when it appeared in 2011, and now Every Day Is for the Thief has arrived in consolidation, though it first appeared in Nigeria in 2007. Neither book offers much of the structure or imaginative texture of fiction, with Open City resembling a ...”

“... this barrister of Catholic repression is widely envisioned as modernity’s diapason: the clear, strong note of individual conscience, sounding against the authoritarian intolerance of the Early Modern state. Thomas More died in defence of an authoritarian intolerance much more powerful than a mere king’s, however, for he died believing in God and in the ...”

“... above the level of most of the other officers.’ Among the new recruits, he recalled, there was a strong feeling that people ‘like the deposed King and Mrs Simpson’ had deceived the public about Nazism, encouraging them to see it as a bulwark against Bolshevism and depicting the greatest evil as another war with Germany. This naturally led to a ...”

“... lord in succession to Lord Bingham. We decided the case was so important that we would sit nine strong to hear it, rather than the usual five. About a week before the appeal was to be heard, the Grand Chamber at Strasbourg gave judgment in the case of A, the terrorist suspect who had succeeded so dramatically in persuading the House of Lords to destroy the ...”

“... manages to associate all that was best and simplest in Russia with that class – which was under strong attack at the time he was writing War and Peace – and with its achievement. He suggests that ‘good’ Russia is, and always has been, classless. Such a claim is never uncommon among those at the top of the tree in any country, but Tolstoy makes it with ...”

“... Although Israel soon aligned itself with the US, many Israelis in and out of government retained strong affections for the Soviet Union. Predictably, Jews in America who weren’t on the Left preferred to keep Israel at arm’s length.From the start of the Cold War, the mainstream Jewish organisations were eager for the fray. Faced with a stereotype of Jews ...”

“... furious bewilderment and confusion, an effect which, like a mad scene in an opera, demands strong powers of control. On stage, the poise vanishes, raw pain taking its place. Several lacerating exchanges between Medea and Jason are taken directly from Aftermath, and the feelings Cusk’s heroine expresses pick up from her own uncomprehending sense of ...”

“... brought trouble for humans as well – or for us ‘muggles’, as J.K. Rowling has it. In 1610 Simon Forman, watching Macbeth, was quite sure that the ‘witches’ (as we would label them) were ‘feiries or Nimphes’ and perhaps others thought so too. In Henry V Mistress Quickly of the Boar’s Head Tavern, lamenting the death of Falstaff, cries that ...”

“... plot. A writer telling it according to the calendar, in Hynes’s manner, must desperately envy Simon Schama, in his Citizens, where irreversible changes in the national consciousness seem to be happening almost every other week. There are of course other plot-elements in Hynes’s narrative, less directly measured by the calendar: for instance, a story ...”

“... with meagre resources, he adds (so is Japan, but today technology is vastly more potent). Its strong points did not lie in magnitude of output, but in specialised crafts: high-grade cloth, paper-making, tobacco-processing, diamond-polishing. Technical improvements came thick and fast, ‘contraptions and contrivances of every sort’. Why did all this ...”