“... Did he lose his enthusiasm for the French Revolution after the Terror and the outbreak of war with Britain? Or did he merely keep his head down during Dundas’s counter-terror in the 1790s, writing for the drawer and staying secretly in touch with seditious comrades? Most recently, critics have asked where Burns stood on slavery. The poet who raised ...”

“... keeping the ladder of social promotion open, resisting the encroachments of the English governing class’. Ascherson had just left his job as the Observer’s Eastern Europe correspondent to report on Scottish politics for the Scotsman. ‘Coming back,’ he wrote, ‘is not an action which is familiar in the pattern of Scottish activities, if I except ...”

“... intellectual rather than the universal scholar – had begun to emerge following the Second World War. The new intellectuals were concerned with ‘relevance’ rather than excellence; their preoccupations were grounded in the politics and societies around them and in that sense no longer strictly ‘universal’. During the 1960s, a reform movement gathered ...”

“... to provisional acceptance within the majority culture – a means of transcending racial and class barriers. His male characters enter ritzy Knightsbridge clubs on the arm of well-to-do white women. But there are still pitfalls: one of Moses’s Jamaican friends is treated like a possession by a wealthy Chelsea resident whose house has ‘all sorts of ...”

“... was held to be more responsible for her husband’s policies than he was, more responsible for the war in Iraq than the rarely mentioned Bush administration, responsible for Obama’s policies as though he had carried out her agenda rather than she his. The narratives cast her as a demoness with unlimited powers, or as a wicked woman, because she had had power ...”

“... the particular is in the service of the general. Biography, a digressive art, is customarily at war with main themes in the history of ideas, but cross-comparison has been achieved here. And there are bonuses, also well integrated, as in the captivating chapters on Victorian Imperialists and adventurers in the bush. The skill with which each contributor or ...”

“... Ahdaf Soueif’s new novel felt bereaved: ‘I have derived more enjoyment from Anna Karenina and War and Peace,’ Lady Anna Winterbourne notes in her diary, ‘than from any other novels that I have read.’ The Map of Love suggests that Soueif herself may have Tolstoyan aspirations. Aspirations, not pretensions: there is an engaging modesty about her ...”

“... example, contained the correspondence Lawrence had with Bertrand Russell during the First World War, another, entitled Lawrence in Love, presented the letters he wrote during his abortive engagement to Louie Burrows, one of the many girls who seem to have fallen irrevocably in love with him when he was an unknown youth. Now, it seems, those of us who live ...”

“... her advisers recently revealed that she actively contemplated privatising it. During the Falklands War the BBC’s insistence on referring to ‘British troops’ rather than ‘our boys’ rendered the Prime Minister incandescent with rage. But the ITV franchises came up for renewal before the BBC’s Charter, and so it was the commercial sector which felt ...”

“... with them: ‘they destroy all one’s judgment – turn one into an ape.’ For an upper-middle-class young lady, born in the reign of Victoria, these were unusual sentiments. Song of Love provides a much clearer picture of Noel’s character than could be seen in the documents previously available. She told Rupert that when she was a child Edward Garnett ...”

“... country, leaving it, and then choosing to return. He was born into the Ontario upper-middle class in 1913, and educated at two of its traditional preserves, Upper Canada College and Queens University. He then went to Balliol, where he wrote a thesis on Shakespeare’s boy actors. After Oxford he joined the Old Vic as an actor and lecturer on the history ...”

“... his campaign against the traditional parties, in 2018, he won over thousands of young middle-class professionals and students who hoped that the family fiefdoms – the Bhuttos’ Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), the Sharif brothers’ Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) and the Party of Islamic Scholars, formerly led by Maulana Mufti Mahmood and now by his ...”

“... say that bags are not your bag. The items on display include a sturdy container for a Second World War gas mask; a delicate 2019 bucket woven from bamboo, silk and leather; a Versace pouch punctured with safety pins; and – hello, Lucy Ellmann – a tasselled 18th-century falconry bag whose inside pockets are embroidered with a woman in a scarlet slit of a ...”

“... the price of doing so is higher than ever. Even before the instability caused by Putin’s war, gas markets were failing to meet post-lockdown energy demands. Reserves depleted during the cold winter of 2020-21 haven’t been replaced. The UK only imports a fraction of its gas from Russia (5 per cent, compared with 41 per cent for the rest of ...”

“... help draft and sign the Declaration of Independence; in Paris to negotiate the treaty ending the war with Britain; in Philadelphia for the creation of the Constitution. He had not only an uncanny knack for showing up where history was happening, but an instinctive flair for striking poses, whether holding the kite as the lightning struck, wearing a coonskin ...”