“... word in the poem to ‘demon’ might lead us to prefer Hays’s version. But then with Brecht we may not want the theological dimension of Kafka’s claim, and if we’re in an atheistic mood, we can think he just means ‘very very bad’. In any case, the word certainly also means ‘angry’. The situation becomes more delicate when Rilke, in the ...”

“... of fashionable sensibility perhaps; of some of the less palatable elements in her background she may have been unaware. She may never have known that her 16-year-old ‘cousin’ Joseph, who appeared in the Kauffman family in 1750, travelled with them for some time and then drifted away again to pursue a much less ...”

“... that senses are sometimes given to concepts at Oxford after the gates close to visitors; but that may be a leg-pull.) Nor am I clear what you’re supposed to do with a notion once a sense has been given it. There used to be a story according to which empirical inquiry works by first giving senses to notions, and then scouting around for something for the ...”

“... free’ means something like the opposite of what it meant for Gowing. The aim of the co-curators, David Blayney Brown, Amy Concannon and Smiles, is to set Turner’s last paintings free from what Brown calls the ‘reductive critical stereotypes’ that have been applied to his work by those who are determined to ignore its historicity, as if its quality and ...”

“... we can win here … In the end, we must enforce a principle whereby the only way the powerful may enjoy privacy is when it is the same kind shared by the ordinary: one enforced by the laws of nature, rather than the policies of man. Greenwald next saw some documents. His heart is always racing, he’s always plunging in, getting excited, and he’s always ...”

“... powerful man in the country and do their best to pretend he has some claim to be taken seriously (David Cameron reached the same plateau when his inability to remember how many houses he owned was allowed to fade into oblivion). With the result in the bag, the party handlers could safely let Kenny out of his pen for the final three-way debate. All in ...”

“... desire to score points is the only conceivable reason for reading The Man without Qualities. It may be that these views belong only to Madeleine, who can’t imagine any sensible person really believing in all this stuff. But Eugenides never allows us to see it as anything but a pose. It’s in the nature of this kind of theory that its worth can be ...”

“... of less than £2000, they proposed to pay the managing director alone £350 a year). But Cambridge may in any case have been an unwise place in which to launch a venture of this kind. The locals, it’s been suggested, were never likely to be enticed away from bathing in the Cam (and certainly not if the alternative cost two and six). Ferdinand Mount, who ...”

“... American politics is propelled by laws quite different from any known in Europe. A great deal may be traced back to the elections of the 1960s. Jeff Manza and Clem Brooks, in their study Social Cleavages and Political Change: Voter Alignments and US Party Coalitions (1999), found that the old religious split between voters was deepest in 1960, as ...”

“... play in structuring American society – while at the same time reminding us that those beliefs may be rational but they’re not true. As Tzvetan Todorov pointed out a long time ago, the fact that some women were once thought of as witches and sometimes burned as witches did not make them witches, even socially constructed ones, and the conceptual ...”

“... much like our own, Shapiro quotes the sonneteer Giles Fletcher, who wrote in 1593 that ‘A man may write of love, and not be in love, as well as of husbandry, and not go to the plough, or of witches and be none.’ ‘If Giles Fletcher could compose sonnets to “try” his “humour”,’ Shapiro says, ‘Shakespeare could have done so too.’ True, and ...”

“... and gladiatorial contests, but there is little chance of the same happening here. In practice, one may be sure, it will be the new elite who will flock to the games in their Mercs and BMWs. It is quite common in South Africa for higher civil servants or mayors and councillors from poor areas to award themselves trips to the Olympics or other such international ...”

“... A man may find Naples or Palermo merely pretty,’ James Elroy Flecker, one-time British vice-consul in Beirut, wrote in October 1914, ‘but the deeper violet, the splendour and desolation of the Levant waters, is something that drives into the soul.’ A month later, Russia, Britain and France declared war on the Ottoman Empire in response to the Turkish fleet’s foolhardy bombardment of Odessa and Sevastopol ...”

“... is much better, muscular and panoramic, but it lacks the surprise details and sense of outrage of David Peace’s treatment in his great miner’s strike novel, GB84.* Welsh makes his political points more effectively through his storytelling. Renton and Sick Boy move to London and live in a filthy towerblock in pre-gentrification Hackney – ‘the London ...”

“... mutually hostile zones. To speak, as Sumption does, of an ‘iron curtain’ partitioning France may be an exaggeration, but the geographical, legal, even psychological division of the country, which had always been difficult to unite, was not resolved for a long time. The city of Paris, which looms large throughout Sumption’s narrative, became intolerable ...”