“... work is universally described as the crown of all the works of the master’. By the time of Robert Stevenson’s Spanish Cathedral Music of the Golden Age (1961), ‘the master’ had become ‘a great genius’. Evidence of actual performances also began to increase, particularly in France, where Charles Bordes, basing his edition on Haberl’s and ...”

“... campaigned against a scheme of sending the ‘Black poor’ on London’s streets to Sierra Leone. Robert Wedderburn, born in Jamaica, became a celebrated preacher and orator; his was an uncompromising Black voice. He linked political radicalism with abolitionism and threatened British slave owners with the fate suffered by French planters in the Haitian ...”

“... the crisis-era emergency funding; from the point of view of international economic governance that may prove to be the most clear-cut test yet of the stance of the Trump presidency. A stark illustration of the asymmetrical structure of American world order came in recent months in the use of the dollar-based system of invoicing for international trade to ...”

“... but even Manzoni is susceptible to the overly theatrical gesture, the rhetorical flourish that may have worked in his day but now strikes us as an exaggerated movement from the silent film era. Levi was not himself a great novelist; If Not Now, When? is his weakest work even if it was the most immediately successful. He was not a great writer of short ...”

“... with new thousands of innocent dead, it will be the response of a nation merely. I fear that we may do that, but hope that we will not. By what we do now, and what we refrain from doing, we ought to wish to be seen to act on behalf of the human nature from which the agents of terror have cut themselves off. In the days after the planes hit, the US appeared ...”

“... fighting to the last bullet to defend Hitler in his bunker, could emerge as best choice for the Robert Schuman Prize for services to European unity.* Why should European justice too not let bygones be bygones? More generally, appointments to the court had little or nothing to do with juridical qualifications. Nearly all were political. The Belgian judge was ...”

“... collapsed and was nationalised) being darkly responsible for Madam’s guilty silence. There may be something to this but the larger truth is surely that the culture of the House of Commons, and thus of our political life in general, is determined not, as in the case of Congress or the Bundestag, by its committees, but by meetings of the whole ...”

“... us as a family, but we are part of its revolutionary story and provide much of its romance. In May 1917, Michael Collins came down for a few days to Longford, one of those anonymous midland counties that tourists in Ireland pass through quickly on the way to somewhere they’ve been told to go. It is a boggy and flat array of fields, interrupted by a few ...”

“... the Treasury after New Labour’s victory. Robinson’s fortune had been inflated by dealings with Robert Maxwell, the Channel Island tax havens and a legacy from a satirically named Madame Bourgeois, a Belgian heiress. He had no political base in the Commons and may have felt it politic to bankroll Blair’s closest ...”

“... at the beginning that Wilder has ‘the gift of knowing what the truth looks like’, and that he may have this from being a journalist, you know that nothing too demanding is going to happen. This is the territory of received ideas backed up by false premises. But then there are real benefits to this approach. The slacker the question, the better Wilder’s ...”

“... anything nowadays except the theory of science? His own answer to this question is affirmative. It may seem that the so-called ‘analytic’ tradition in philosophy – the tradition that goes back to Frege and Russell and whose most prominent living representatives are Quine, Davidson, Dummett and Putnam – must return a negative answer. For that tradition ...”

“... intense awareness and a habit of self-expression have been common in the history of the sport. Robert Graves climbed difficult routes in Snowdonia with Mallory just before the Great War and was told by Geoffrey Winthrop Young that he had ‘the finest natural balance’ he had ever seen in a climber. At the height of his enthusiasm he wrote that climbing ...”

“... short-suffering Mosley with his other help-meet Diana Guinness née Mitford. Mosley’s biographer Robert Skidelsky avers that ‘Mosley always tried to maintain the old English distinction between private life and public life.’ But Mosley came up against that other, even more powerful, old English tradition or law which has recently snuffed out ...”

“... became a highly-paid lecturer. He died in 1944. Leacock held his own in the world of Will Rogers, Robert Benchley, James Thurber, the early Wodehouse, A.P. Herbert and ‘Beachcomber’. Americans, or some of them, accepted him as a successor to Mark Twain. His Yankee-style hyperbole did not, for once, upset the British, for he practised the tricks of ‘sly ...”

“... American films of the Forties, such as Body and Soul (1947), written by Polonsky and directed by Robert Rossen, or Polonsky’s Force of Evil (1948), exposed the corrosive effects of a culture devoted to money. The most overtly pro-Soviet films produced in Hollywood, Mission to Moscow (1943), written by Howard Koch, and Song of Russia (1944), written by ...”