“... aware of its multiracial character: a chapter of history of which all Britons can be proud. As Christopher Brown’s excellent recent book on the abolition movement suggests, Britain, the world’s leading slave trader in the 18th century, later presented abolition as irrefutable proof of its virtuous motives as it embarked on a new era of ...”

“... to an analysis of Donne’s poem ‘The Bait’, which, Alareer explains, is a parody of the Christopher Marlowe poem generally known as ‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’. When you parody something, Alareer says, ‘you try to offer the readers another possibility, of another worldview, a different worldview, telling the people: hey, this isn’t ...”

“... This summer​ , a new monument appeared in Budapest’s Liberty Square. Amid a copse of truncated white marble pillars stands the metal figure of a slender young man. Wrapped from hips to feet in windswept drapery, he opens his arms to the sky. In his right hand he bears the orb of political authority surmounted by the Hungarian double-barred cross ...”

“... about to be exposed in the press as the assiduous client of a call-girl, with whom he had shared White House secrets. It was the worst possible kind of scandal for Clinton, given the past stories of his own extra-marital affairs, now more relevant than ever because of his decidedly puritanical electoral stance. And the scandal came at the very worst time for ...”

“... he is stuck for ever in the era of the liberation struggle. During the many years of Ian Smith’s white minority regime, it seemed there was little that Mugabe’s party, Zanu, could do in the face of white power. Zanu’s armed wing, Zanla, was no match for the better trained and better equipped Rhodesians, and Mugabe ...”

“... A really nasty, dirty little war … Waste of time, money and everything else’ was the way Christopher Bilney, who served as a seaplane pilot in the Caucasus in 1919, remembered it in old age. He was one of many British veterans whose memories of Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War of 1918-20 were ‘uneasy, with guilt and a sense of failure lurking beneath surface jollity ...”

“... had travelled more than 20 kilometres to arrive at our table.’ To accompany them, ‘pink-and-white peaches with the complexion of a Boucher milkmaid’ and ‘figs so ripe their purple skins had started to split open, threatening to reveal their juicy, red, pornographic interiors’. The House in France is Wells’s account of life with her mother, the ...”

“... her own ‘Praise Song for the Herring’, versified from a book of 1881, which sounds a bit like Christopher Smart. And 1881 was the year Craske was born. There are lots of short threads like this in the book: among other things, we pick up information about the Glandford Shell Museum, the Little Auk, Gilbert White, sea ...”

“... what order. Stanzas follow the movement of eye and mind from road to roadside, through ‘leafless white birches’ to a munitions plant, or to the ‘beauty,/at the swamp’s centre: the/dead-end highway, abandoned/ when the new bridge went in’. Williams’s most powerful lines show, in ‘Spring Strains’ for example, how an observer might scan a young ...”

“... administrators, magazine chieftain, amanuensis to Joe McCarthy, father-confessor of the Nixon White House, Ronald Reagan consigliere: is it any wonder that William F. Buckley is still the patron saint of the American right? For more than half a century, he supplied a gloss of coherence and glamour to a movement sorely lacking in both. With his ...”

“... well to acknowledge them. Nor is it a question of simply shifting gear, dropping the pretence of white-coated clinical neutrality and owning up to a frank dislike for novels which (whether crudely or cleverly) box the reader into an ideological corner. For Suleiman there is no such line to be crossed between the interests of ‘theory’ and those of doing ...”

“... approach of Guy de Mallac and others, worthy as their pioneering studies have been. But Christopher Barnes’s ‘Literary Biography’, of which this solid work is the first of two volumes, will certainly become the standard and indispensable guide for students not only of the poet but of his age and literary milieu. The popular Western image of ...”

“... and republican racists like Adams all found the Germania indispensable. In A Most Dangerous Book, Christopher Krebs, a young German Latinist who teaches at Harvard, tells part of this complicated story with wit, economy and learning. He carefully describes how Tacitus served Rome as a senator and governor. But the bulk of his attention goes to the ...”

“... invited his friend Isherwood to join him in Berlin. Thirty-five years later, in his autobiography Christopher and his Kind, Isherwood wrote: ‘To Christopher, Berlin meant Boys.’ But in the same book he also points out that Auden ‘had now begun to write lines which are like the slogans of a psychiatric doctor about to ...”

“... truly represent a distinct mutant species of crybaby. Ellis’s​ first non-fiction work, White, is an expansion of his podcast concerns and complaints but not a deepening – more of a distention. Although the book has been promoted as an ‘incendiary polemic’, it’s more of a lazy Susan of memoir, cultural reflections, pharmacological ...”