“... rusted and warped. But in the past five years, China has re-emerged as a force in Africa, and may soon be the most important foreign power on the continent. At a summit in Shanghai in May, Chinese leaders promised a further $20 billion to Africa, though it is unclear whether this is intended to take the form of aid or ...”

“... broadly right, even if it is far from the mainstream view among the Anglo-American commentariat. Robert Kagan, for example, remains bullishly confident of America’s supremacy in his new (and ruefully titled) book, The Return of History and the End of Dreams.* He believes that the US should assume ‘leadership of a united democratic bloc’ against the ...”

“... head, rather than worn in a tight knot. I have never seen him dressed like that before, though it may have nothing to do with his recent ‘accident’. ‘Shlonak, Sheikh?’ I ask how he is in Iraqi Arabic. ‘Al hamdullilah’ (‘God be praised’). ‘Ahlan wa sahlan’ (‘Welcome’). ‘And I you, Mr Rory,’ he says, in a rare phrase of English, and ...”

“... Rumsfeld in the wake of the mid-term elections, and his replacement as secretary of defense by Robert Gates, a member of Baker’s group, appears to testify to such a change. ‘Security’ in Iraq seems to have been reduced to its most basic meaning of safety from physical harm. Whether it’s a matter of Iraqi government personnel, of communities and ...”

“... the influence which is moved not, but moves.’ It’s a daunting job description. But although it may not have been common in the past century or so for poets to speak of themselves as ‘hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration’, the idea of a special bardic role didn’t disappear in the post-Romantic generations. It was still present, in suitably ...”

“... programme of the federal government; and a lot of them were listening to their radios in April, May, June and July. But there have also been grounds for fear that were genuine: a fact the prosperous neoliberal consensus lightly brushed off. Non-fanatical Americans of modest means have wondered how their children will pay for the emergency measures we are ...”

“... they were following, in some measure and according to their capacity, the brilliant example of Robert Graves, whose coming to maturity as a poet was a matter of saying a decisive ‘goodbye’ not only to the war but to all ghosts and rubbish (including cast-off language) that threatened the living. It was in 1930 that T.S. Eliot wrote in Criterion, with ...”

“... academy, McGann responds to its changing sub-cultures: by 1990 his prose was harder to read, and may have become vaguer instead of merely seeming so. But in his central stand on history he has given little if any ground. He has little in common with the Califomian style of so-called New Historicism, with its reliance on over-general propositions attributed ...”

“... to Nathaniel Haynes’s History of the Disciples of Christ in Illinois (Cincinnati, 1915). And he may be the only 20th-century reader of The Biography of Elder Brown Warren Stone written by himself, with Additions and Reflections by Elder John Rogers (Cincinnati, 1847). He describes the way you could make out the shape of his uncle’s toes through the ...”

“... Sorel was standard nonsense among professors of history and politics hostile to the New Left: one may search in vain for any favourable reference to Sorel in New Left ideology.’) I had also been National Organiser for the Youth Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, extending our concerns to a campaign against the use of napalm. I had stood for the Greater ...”

“... Hugh Dalton observed that no good book ever got written between division bells. Crosland may have benefited from an enforced sabbatical. The Future of Socialism is not an academic study, however. The energy it conveys comes from the sense of its author as somebody recently bloodied in battle, waiting for the next push. Nor should Crosland be seen as ...”

“... has developed, beginning with the founding Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the form of which may have been influenced by the 1729 English translation of the Tractatus that was in Benjamin Franklin’s library, a collection used for reference by the framers of the Constitution. Spinoza’s prospectus for a post-Jewish and post-Christian world was part of ...”

“... of the family worried about propriety and suppressed unflattering information. Sometimes we may forgive them. Arnold’s wife Fanny Lucy (‘Flu’) struck out all favourable references to herself – exactly why? At other times we encounter outright lies or convenient omissions. Matthew skipped out on his sister Jane’s wedding to William Forster of ...”

“... on to describe Shakespeare’s Dream as, in effect, performing a function analogous to that of Robert Bly’s ‘men’s movement’: the male anxieties revealed by Foreman and de Maisse about being ruled by this dubiously sexy old woman are imaginatively soothed through the conquest of the Amazon queen, Hippolyta, and the erotic humiliation of the fairy ...”

“... cause in Spain in 1936 she wrote to a friend: ‘I feel it is my duty not to do my duty.’ In May 1935 the bank Blake had been working for in Paris collapsed in circumstances which meant its top officials might go to jail. Blake fled to America with his mother and Stead. He had been overworked and unsatisfied by the world of banking; now, they ...”