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“... much as we do. His subject is Pretending. There are those among us who felt our lives were shaped by the balanced but enigmatic Grant, even as we knew (without understanding properly) that this tanned Mr Lucky, a Beverly Hills rake, had once been Archie Leach, a pale kid from a cold, unhappy home in Bristol.That was the magical cut in his career. It isn’t ...”

“... ensuring that the apparent triumph of freedom over fascism in the Second World War should instead be understood as a defeat. Inspired by its founding father, Friedrich von Hayek, whose rallying call The Road to Serfdom had been published three years earlier, the organisation believed that the price of victory had been too ...”

“... century, shortly after the Queen’s Hall opened as a new musical venue in 1893. As such, they may be regarded as a classic instance of what is sometimes called ‘invented tradition’, where venerable antiquity is less in evidence than is often popularly supposed; and where change and adaptation are at least as important as continuity and survival, even ...”

“... list. But most of their work has dealt primarily with sex as a set of relationships defined by the biological differences between men and women, rather than with gender, which involves the perception and social construction of those differences. And as Peter Burke points out in his foreword to this short but intriguing book, even historians of gender ...”

“... over.’ What to believe, Mr Boffin’s chief difficulty in Our Mutual Friend, is also likely to be the chief difficulty facing the reader of Richard Poirier’s ambitious and eloquent plea for the ‘renewal’ of literature and criticism through a better understanding of Emerson. Believing all may involve something close to a conversion. Believing none ...”

“... few socialists left today who is still drawn to this vision of an egalitarian community governed by the principle of freely-given service, and Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality can be seen as an indirect attempt to reaffirm its relevance. On the surface its concerns may seem to ...”

“... I thought I had best begin by expressing some old-buffer prejudices in general,’ Empson told the British Society of Aesthetics in 1961: ‘but now I will turn to English Literature, which it is my business to know about, and try to examine the fundamentals, the basic tools.’ As he turns to literature, he shelves the old-buffer prejudices and begins to display instead the rationalism which spoke habitually of the ‘basic tools’ of imagination, and the sensitivity to language which enabled him to examine and test those tools ...”

“... them myself.’ She squinted at the next name on the list. ‘Oh look, fancy that, they used to be at university together, you know.’ It was the name of the lady principal of Somerville College, Oxford, Daphne Park, who has, we read here, a history of an elusive kind in Zambia and the Congo. One or two of the other names on the list I had already come ...”

“... in four centuries, few new country houses were being built, and many old ones were being vacated by their original owners. Although far from extinct, country-house life during the first forty years of the 20th century was not lived with quite the same sense of effortless, exuberant expansiveness which had characterised it a hundred years before. And, since ...”

“... Admittedly, the latter is more difficult, but the difficulties are made greater than they need be by a failure to seek entry to the scientific realm by the most appropriate and accessible route. That route is the one which the main mass of the Victorians had the good sense to use but which in more recent years has ...”

“... is at first ‘of excellent discourse’ but later is a devil. Nothing is as it seems; nothing can be accurately labelled. And if nothing can be identified, identity and the ability to distinguish between different identities is nothing. This may represent an ideal of Shakespeare’s, who was the father of twins, though of ...”

“... Centre in London who liked to cap the account he gave visitors of why he had rejected the West by pointing one slim, denunciatory finger at that most improbable of culprits, the Ealing comedies. ‘How can one possibly defend,’ he would ask rhetorically, ‘a civilisation that considers a film like Kind Hearts and Coronets funny? Think about it for a ...”

“... of Democrats and, most potent of all, immigration and the wall with Mexico. The pieces can be juggled almost at random. Still, the apparent evacuation of Syria was major news, and it hogged the headlines very satisfactorily. It was, he said on Twitter, ‘time for us to get out’ and let others ‘figure the situation out’. Believers might see this ...”

“... It’s not​ 1940. Might it, though, be 1945? By that I don’t mean we are at the end of some epic contest of national survival, let alone of national liberation. It’s not been that sort of contest, and anyway, this doesn’t look much like the end. But for the last few years normal politics has effectively been on hold as the government has grappled with a grim and grinding task that has consumed almost all its energies ...”

“... The weight-bearing ideas were conspiracy and co-ordination. ‘Conspiracy’: a conscious plan by two or more parties to commit an act they know to be illegal. ‘Co-ordination’: work performed together. You couldn’t tie Trump’s actions to either activity.The second main finding concerned obstruction of ...”