“... are not among them. On the contrary, success in politics is a matter of rule-breaking and rampant self-interest, and power is exploited solely for personal enrichment. (A variant of this mentality manifests in online claims that Volodymyr Zelensky is a liar who wants more of British taxpayers’ money so he can build up his fleet of luxury cars.)Hilhorst was ...”

“... of his country in the aftermath of the Nicaraguan earthquake. Winding it up came a warning from Robert Bork against the menace of the ‘clerisy of power’ now (under the Ford Presidency) steering the nation towards the shoals of equality and uniformity. The following bumper issue of the National Review, on 5 December, was mainly taken up with the text of ...”

“... to the power of editors. After reading Sidney Colvin’s edition of the letters of his friend Robert Louis Stevenson, he wrote: ‘One has the vague sense of omissions and truncations – one smells the thing unprinted.’ In the years after James’s death, his family in the United States was concerned about his reputation, especially about what Edel ...”

“... a matter of months before the Corbett-Ashley case by the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Robert Stoller, who proposed the distinction in his 1968 study, Sex and Gender – the second volume was called The Transsexual Experiment. For Stoller, gender was identity, sex was genital pleasure, and humans would always give priority to the first (many ...”

“... interviewees, a vivid picture emerges of the parsonage and its inhabitants: the literary (self-described) eccentric, Patrick, working on his sermons, agitating for local causes and eating his meals alone. Aunt Branwell – Elizabeth Branwell – who came to care for the children after the death of their mother, her sister Maria, and is remembered for ...”

“... this year’). He got an A in Metalwork, but the teacher couldn’t think of his name and wrote ‘Robert’ while telling him to keep up the good work. His form teacher, Mr Norman, said that ‘Ronnie’s attitude and standard of work is slipping. I hope that he takes note of what has been said to him recently. He is always pleasant and happy.’ Ronnie ...”

“... of the husband is getting shakier every day.’ Gazing at the horizon, she pistons forward on a self-imposed treadmill: a comrade-athlete driving, by force of will, the engine of the city. This is East London, four years short of that 17-day corporate extravaganza, the ‘primary strategic objective’ to which we are all so deeply mortgaged. Haggerston ...”

“... when the bay here was deserted. Had she tailed him in order to make one last bootless act of self-abasement manifest itself in Stone? He entered the ferry, no more than a full-size rowing boat, and waved goodbye to Miss Kate. She waved goodbye perhaps affectionately. Startled, doltish-looking Jane reappeared with ice-creams from the store. She noted ...”

“... which for their combination of learning and penetration excel even those of his master, Ernst Robert Curtius – there is nothing said which he was not equally ready to say, mutatis mutandis, about Montale. He studied the poetry of the past on the assumption that in the present there could be great poets too. For Contini history is now and now is ...”

“... might be brought against the ideas he intended to put forward. Perhaps, not so much a mark of self-assurance, it was merely a mannerism to confound his enemies, but it made an impression on me because my consciousness found such a tactic congenial. Otherwise, why remember an incident from a film of so long ago, when scores more are totally ...”

“... in trade unions for four years. In 2012 Moyer-Lee helped found the IWGB in order, as its sometimes self-dramatising, revolutionary red website puts it, to organise ‘the unorganised, the abandoned and the betrayed’. In June, when I first visited the offices, Moyer-Lee told me it already had six hundred members. ‘The vast majority are cleaners, bicycle ...”

“... Rév is the guardian of great stores of the past century’s lies and half-truths, deceptions and self-deceptions, representations and re-representations of mass horror and private mendacity, at all levels from the highest councils of state to the lowliest policeman. With sober, biting but never ingenuous hopefulness, he wrings its truths from the dross of ...”

“... antagonism or independence. But there is a poetry of pliancy which differs from mere propaganda or self-abasement. In this poetry, the words on the page bring with them an awareness that they might have been different: the strain on the bent knee is kept in view. No one, after all, would take praise in a panegyric as being merely true: the ‘judgment’ it ...”

“... was thought likely to get a first but didn’t; he was understandably a little mortified but his self-reproach can’t have been helped when he received a note from McFarlane saying, ‘Here are your marks and pretty miserable they are, too.’ Others of his year with less resilience than Adam received similar notes and I find this hard to understand, let ...”

“... control. ‘Elite rule is an inevitable by-product of secrecy,’ the American political scientist Robert Dahl noted in 1953. ‘Those who effectively influence policy can scarcely exceed the number of those who possess the information to act.’ Yet democratically elected governments have always marked out things their own citizens are not allowed to ...”