“... arriving at a time when it has been rejuvenated by the war in Ukraine, has prompted a carnival of self-congratulation. In July, the leaders of all member nations, from Biden to Orbán to Zelensky, turned up in Washington for Nato’s birthday summit, including Starmer in his first week on the job and Macron days after losing his governing authority. The ...”

“... the empire. Until the war began, tolerance and compromise kept many of those visions on hold. In Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities (1930), set in Vienna just before the war and a monument to the Habsburg polity, Ulrich, the protagonist, has been ‘accustomed his whole life long to expect politics to bring about not what needed to happen, but rather ...”

“... independence of the Transvaal, and won election to Parliament as a Crofters’ MP for Caithness. Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham was a member of the Scottish aristocracy who became famous in Argentina as ‘Don Roberto’ for his exploits as a cattle rancher, returning home to become the first president of the Scottish Labour Party and, later, the honorary ...”

“... too, but the war made its way into the nervous system of her poems indirectly and mysteriously. Robert Lowell was a high-profile conscientious objector, writing to Roosevelt in September 1943 with a ‘Declaration of Personal Responsibility’ which objected to the mining of the Ruhr Dams and the bombing of Hamburg. He concluded: In 1941 we undertook a ...”

“... one? There are many ways in which the imagination creates and imparts knowledge. Is this claim self-evident, or just untrue – untrue because the imagination, whatever its wonders and virtues, doesn’t deal in knowledge in any but the weakest, least demanding sense? There are all kinds of good things which are not knowledge, and we should not betray them ...”

“... to evidence and basic logic (resistance can only result from ignorance, speciesist prejudice and self-interest). But it seems odd for him to say, as he does towards the end of the book, that the claims of Animal Liberation Now ‘at no point … require acceptance of utilitarianism’. His arguments often look like utilitarian arguments; they are certainly ...”

“... in 1962 after a run of terrible by-election results, this was entirely typical of his undeviating self-interest, although in that Night of the Long Knives it turned out he had been so sharp he cut himself, fatally. Not surprisingly, throughout his life he was disliked by many and hated by quite a few. At Eton, he received 13 blackballs in the election for the ...”

“... American confidence. These were the years in which Stanley Fischer, acting as itinerant bagman for Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, would disburse stand-by credits and loans from the IMF, in sovereign disregard of its statutes, according to the political value to Washington of incumbent regimes around the world. The two chief beneficiaries of his largesse ...”

“... and stars Jennifer Lawrence as a new mother who begins to fall apart after she and her partner (Robert Pattinson) move from New York to rural Montana. The photography is close and jittery and the sound claustrophobic. It has been described as a film ‘about’ postpartum depression, but it is far from being an issue film in the way that might suggest ...”

“... of On the Origin of Species in 1859 and, Tennyson told Moxon, before its sensationalist precursor, Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, came out in 1844. Holmes is sceptical about this, thinking that Tennyson must have been reacting to Chambers’s observation that, within evolution, ‘the Individual … is to the Author of ...”

“... break between the first three, conceived early on as a trilogy, and the last, which is more self-standing, with features that mark it off from its predecessors. Covering the epoch from the French Revolution to the First World War, the trilogy follows a consistent scheme, classically Marxist in its logic: each volume begins with an account of the ...”

“... I care about artificial black & white “success” if I haven’t got a soul but my own perplexed self to talk to? God, Davy, I can’t say how much I miss you.’ In her next letters to Ann, she had bucked up, and described visiting a medical student at Yale, Dick Norton, who became the model for Buddy Willard in The Bell Jar. ‘Yale junior ...”

“... full murder mode. Historical information and interpretation, based largely on Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton’s Vichy France and the Jews, have also been added. The 2503 photographs themselves: these have been reproduced from identity cards and gravestones, from formal studio portraits and intimate snapshots, from school, camp and playground groups, from ...”

“... attitudes to Estonia, McCartan concludes realistically: ‘I am not so sure, therefore, that self-determination for Ireland would raise much enthusiasm in official circles. Anything they are likely to do for Ireland will be done in the hope of breaking up the British Empire and thus further [sic] the world revolution.’ If only people like Bernard Shaw ...”