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“... Maschler’s achievements as a general trade publisher rank him with Archibald Constable, George Smith, John Blackwood, George Routledge, Frederick Macmillan, David Garnett, Ian Parsons, Allen Lane. It was one of the most highly regarded of today’s younger publishers, Peter Straus (now an agent), who commissioned the book. None of these coat-brushers of ...”

“... for them, or getting them to confess, and Wolfson evokes an interesting ambiguity in a remark by Paul de Man and its citation by Marjorie Garber. De Man writes of ‘making the death speak’, which in Garber’s quotation becomes ‘making the dead speak’. As Wolfson notes, the quotation has its logic and perhaps the original was a misprint. But then de ...”

“... as the first novel of the Resistance. In the public realm, her name was firmly linked to Jean-Paul Sartre’s, and to existentialism, which was becoming so fashionable that Sartre had to hire a secretary. No longer a beginner, no longer unknown, Beauvoir had nothing to prove; she could write about anything. She decided to write about herself. She was ...”

“... All that time he remained, despite the mounting hostility of his arch-enemy Cardinal Caraffa, Pope Paul IV, a ‘power in Rome’. And in the conclave which eventually elected Julius III, Pole was offered the papacy by acclamation on the night of 4 December 1549, and next day came within one vote of formal election. There is every reason to think that had he ...”

“... as prime minister. Some of this, of course, also relates to his struggles with Blair. When John Smith died in 1994, and Brown reluctantly decided to step aside to allow Blair to take the crown, it was partly because ‘the Murdoch press were all backing Tony … writing [him] up as the only moderniser. It was wholly unfair but predictable.’ Brown feared ...”

“... cars.’ Note the ‘we’. By her own analysis, Gordimer has always been a legitimate target. Paul Bannerman, the central character in Get a Life, is a campaigning ecologist who, when the novel opens, is suffering from cancer. His treatment has left him radioactive and only his parents, regardless of the danger to their own health, are capable of the ...”

“... ugly and envious – Darcy, the chinless wonder, Bunter, the gross and hideous glutton, Vernon-Smith, the rich but vulgar bounder, Skinner and Stott, the loathsome sneaks. Juvenile readers would eventually come across these repulsive boys in real life: most of them went to work on the staff of Private Eye. The righteous Harry Wharton, of course, joined the ...”

“... or ‘beautiful new hat’ would win his interest. But it was mainly her literary friendship with Paul Bourget, and her beginnings as an author, with The Greater Inclination (1899) and The Valley of Decision (1902), that achieved this aim. ‘The explanation, of course, was that in that interval I had found myself’: Edith Wharton’s first ...”

“... by treating people like Drayson and Bellhouse as heroes for creating wealth from knowledge’ – Paul Drayson and Brian Bellhouse are both medical inventors – ‘that Britain will develop a fully fledged entrepreneurial culture,’ Leadbeater puffs, as if Thatcherism had never happened, and Britain was not a country so infused with the corporate spirit ...”

“... added physiognomical principles to their stock of ideas: Goethe, Heine, Herder, Novalis, Jean Paul, Madame de Staël, Stendhal, George Sand. Many English writers, resisting the fanaticism with which phrenology was being promoted (George Combe’s The Constitution of Man, the central manifesto of the cult, sold 50,000 copies between 1835 and 1838 ...”

“... else do you get a name like that?’ To us cocky British snobs who call the great man ‘Sir Peter Paul Rubens’ and don’t much mind what he called himself, the ‘mistake’ of the tourists is not tragical. But, for William Gaddis, this sort of ignorance leads up to the climax of The Recognitions, where his most admirable character – Stanley, the ...”

“... The publication of Bentham’s Collected Works is likely to produce more new or revised views than the publication of Burke’s Writings and Speeches: indeed, it has already done so. The Bentham project will also take longer, for the establishment of the text is a herculean task. Bentham left a vast archive of notes and of drafts and redrafts of works planned but not published ...”

“... Suddenly we are in Margaret Atwood’s Gilead.Drain may have become the Westboro Baptists’ St Paul – the convert who stiffens the creed and seizes control – but he is a ludicrous figure even by Westboro standards. You can watch him and one of the uncles on YouTube, being nimbly tormented by Russell Brand: two pudgy doofuses you’d think twice about ...”

“... half-Jewish background and made her only foray into political journalism in order to rebuke Pope Paul VI for being tactless to Golda Meir. ‘All the more since I discovered myself to be a Catholic animal,’ she wrote in 1963, ‘am I a Gentile Jewess.’ When Spark was starting out, in the late 1940s, she was determined to avoid the ‘slop and ...”

“... warlord masquerading as a merchant. In Britain, the Company was attacked by Burke and Adam Smith for combining opportunism and monopolistic greed. The Company eventually responded by building up what it saw as its moral superiority and entitlement to rule India, even if only as the ostensible representative of an absent Mughal emperor. Three ideas were ...”