“... to London in 1844, he tried to play on his hosts’ anxieties: ‘Turkey is a dying man. We may endeavour to keep him alive but we shall not succeed … I fear only France.’ He believed he had secured an agreement with the prime minister, Robert Peel, and Lord Aberdeen, his foreign secretary; they thought there had ...”

“... the usual limit of propriety. Then they become a bit more common (in the sense of frequent; they may also come to be regarded as less ‘common’ in the social sense). They do so because they can perform so many social and grammatical functions. They can fill in pauses, establish gender identities, build a group, or serve as all-purpose markers of ...”

“... to spirit of conversation, but I at the same time think the process of modulation and inflection may be quite as complete, or more so, without the external enunciation; and that an author had better try the effect of his sentences on his stomach than on his ear. This is Hazlitt’s way of avoiding claptrap; he’s pleased, for instance, that Shakespeare ...”

“... and so the old Philip Roth line – that American reality will outstrip anything the novelist may imagine – is borne out once more. As a result, this whole section seems not just pallid and unadventurous but insufficiently novelistic. It brings a kind of ‘news’ that is better told by others: if you want to know about American penal culture and the ...”

“... prepared to put the blame on a particular institution. The ‘onset of the movies’, he argues, may well have proved the ‘most influential’ of all innovations in the ‘process’ of modern warfare. The fact that the enduring tension between martial fantasy and an awareness of damage done is unlikely to be resolved any time soon adds a flavour of ...”

“... imagery could doubtless be tested statistically; more usefully, writers with a visual handicap may be stimulated to stretch the connotations of words. Trevor-Roper quotes Tennyson’s ‘the wrinkled sea beneath him crawls’ as an example of short-sighted imagery, and the translation by the blind poet W.H. Coates of a stanza from Shelley’s Prometheus ...”

“... is notably inferior), is perhaps his most successful poem, though this somewhat recherché genre may be caviar to the general. (Indeed, if one defines the genre strictly, as Priscilla Bawcutt has suggested – ‘a literary game, in which the competitors vie in verbal and metrical ingenuity ... a kind of sportive warfare’ – the only other example of it ...”

“... Russia and Western Europe into an obedient lawn. For Putin, so far, the space is Ukraine. For her, Robert Burns’s evil ‘Auld Kate’, it was Poland, though not the compact Polish state of today. It was the enormous, ramshackle Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the ancient Rzeczpospolita or ‘kingly republic’. Its borders changed erratically, but most of ...”

“... philosopher Thomas Davidson, who invited his friend to meet ‘the woman you ought to marry’. It may not be clear who saw her first, but everyone seems to have agreed that Alice Howe Gibbens was destined for William James. Having followed up the proffered advice, William himself dashed off a letter declaring that he had just met ‘the future Mrs ...”

“... Armoured Brigade, serving in northern Europe after D-Day and eventually reaching Prague in May 1945, a couple of weeks after the occupying Russians. He quickly sensed that the prospects for his former homeland were not good, and returned to England, resuming his studies in Oxford in January 1946. He graduated with a First in 1947 (allowed to take a ...”

“... an investigation. ‘As a result of Professor Dean’s comments,’ he explained, ‘there now may be students on our campus who feel threatened in or outside of the classroom.’ An email, with the subject line ‘Invitation to Participate in Investigation’, has been sent to Hobart and William Smith students by a law firm retained by the college ‘to ...”

“... Levy announced by Rishi Sunak when he was chancellor of the Exchequer in the far-off days of May 2022 seemed to meet this requirement – which is why it’s described as a ‘windfall tax’. What this label implies is that chance circumstances, not the efforts or foresight of the beneficiaries, have resulted in a huge financial gain that can be taxed ...”

“... escape from longing; her slight qualification – ‘without hope, without hope of return’ – may imply that, even in glorious isolation, certain hopes persist. And besides, what is being relished here is the contemplation of such a fate, not necessarily the fate itself. Delicious, no doubt, but only when one is in the mood. In The Voyage of the Dawn ...”

“... requirement in doubt. Mount’s account of the framework of the United Kingdom, and what repair it may call for, has already beguiled readers across the political spectrum. Commentators on right and left alike have praised its wit and acumen. If few have seen eye to eye with every proposal it makes, virtually all have agreed that this is the work of an ...”

“... on the quality of life. It’s partly that the men, in particular, can be so insanely boring. That may reflect the way banking has changed, become more intense, more time-consuming and more overtly greedy. David Kynaston, author of a magisterial four-volume history of the City, completed in 2001, observes at the start of the fourth volume that ‘the modern ...”