“... them, the illocutionary force of talking about ‘literature and politics’ was to say ‘I am a young radical who wants to show the value to the left of writing from this period.’ David Norbrook’s Writing the English Republic is the summation of this movement. Norbrook wants there to be a republican cultural moment in ...”

“... Mosul, Picot was unaware that Kitchener and Sykes were secretly planning to give it to him,’ David Fromkin wrote in A Peace to End All Peace (1989). ‘They wanted the French sphere of influence to be extended from the Mediterranean coast on the west all the way to the east so that it paralleled and adjoined Russian-held zones; the French zone was to ...”

“... Fyfes and of her own childhood. Lehmann was good on children, especially the anxieties of the very young. She was good, too, on the mixed moods of life, less commonly found in fiction: the nostalgia of adolescence in Dusty Answer, or, much later in The Echoing Grove, the interplay of habit and passion when a married couple fall asleep in the middle of a ...”

“... North London suburb and in New York, bears the impress of American writers like Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace, clever, nervy exhibitionists, IQs-with-i-Books, guys who, as Smith has put it, ‘know things’, writers with a gift for speedy cultural analysis, whose prose is choppy with interruption. The Autograph Man may indeed be the nearest that a ...”

“... of its readers, there is nothing unusual in an ageing QC using his money and position to gain young admirers; nor about a gap between perceptions of the public and the private man. Yet, despite the excesses to which some barristers are prone, it is almost unknown for them to become notorious for their bacchanalian lifestyles. So why is it that George ...”

“... teacher Leopold Kronecker reviled it as ‘humbug’ and ‘mathematical insanity’, whereas David Hilbert declared: ‘No one shall expel us from the paradise that Cantor has created for us.’ Bertrand Russell recalled in his autobiography that he ‘falsely supposed’ all Cantor’s ‘arguments to be fallacious’, only later realising that ‘all ...”

“... Party does have a libertarian tradition and some belief in the free-born Englishman, whom David Davis surprisingly and quixotically left the front bench to defend. But it’s a tradition more likely to protect people’s pleasures than their rights, and Thatcherism, which was anything but libertarian, almost killed it off. Where these conflicting ...”

“... Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea, every one a bestseller to be avoided with horror and loathing by any young person with the slightest vestige of humour or subversion. It is not just that the Fearsome Foursome live in a world of nannies and apple-cheeked farmers’ wives filling their milk-cans and calling them Miss Susan and Miss Titty (not an appellation which ...”

“... condemnation of communism. Qasem welcomed Barzani back, needing his support to shore up his young regime, and made him certain promises regarding Kurdish autonomy. But soon his Arab nationalism bumped up against the Kurdish variety, and by 1961 the two men had fallen out again. Qasem may also have calculated that he no longer needed the ...”

“... correspondence about what to do. Ida sensibly argued with both parties that Edna was simply too young to know her own mind, which may well have been precisely the reason Clarke Hall and so many other 19th-century men wanted to marry teenage girls. Ellen Terry had been 16 when she married the 46-year-old artist G.F. Watts, Ruskin was the same age when he ...”

“... are things we know innately, though the knowledge may be tacit or unconscious. He was struck by young children’s capacity to form and understand phrases and sentences without being taught. ‘The poverty of the stimulus’ they received – the brevity of their contacts with the world – suggested the inadequacy of behaviourist explanations for language ...”

“... Arthur; we must reject him from our histories and, above all, from the titles of our books,’ David Dumville wrote in 1977; and he was backed up by, for instance, J.N.L. Myres in 1986: ‘No figure on the borderline of history and mythology has wasted more of the historian’s time.’ In his new book, Nicholas Higham cites neither opinion but certainly ...”

“... to the Melbury area went back for generations. His mother was born in Melbury Osmond, and as a young woman she worked in service for the Earl of Ilchester’s uncle, and later for the earl’s brother-in-law. She and Hardy’s father were married in Melbury Osmond Church in 1839. As Hardy grew up he must have listened to many stories of Melbury life, and ...”

“... late in the novel when a friend of Emira’s seems more like a caricature of herself, and of a young Black woman generally, than the nuanced person we met earlier in the novel. That characterisation bothered me, but I was forced to reckon with my own expectations: does that one flat character help to underscore the point of a book like this? Books can be ...”

“... on a stock image developed over centuries, by painters especially. Brueghel in the 16th century, David Teniers in the 17th, and Joseph Wright in the 18th, all painted grimy scenes of reclusion and penury, with hints of mad obsession and radiant wonder. Cornelis Pietersz Bega’s alchemist, from 1663, adds pathos to the mix: were it not for the delicately ...”