“... down a wing of our local Catholic secondary school. It’s not that any of us were evil; even the more bookish and shy among us were given to a bit of destructive boredom and stupid imagining. Now and then it got out of hand. The boys I hung around with in my pre-teen years were always losing the head. During the good weather, the light nights, what started ...”

“... a name’ – and I suspect the one that brought the tears, climaxes the second stanza and is more or less borrowed from Falstaff and Shakespeare (‘What’s in this word honour?’). Kipling often insists on the panic and emptiness the troops far from home felt in battle, but it is Newbolt who understates that knowledge most effectively. No wonder ...”

“... could provoke disastrous swings in the exchange rate unless the local currency was pegged to a more stable counterpart such as the French franc, especially in the age of Bretton Woods. Marchés coloniaux also reasoned that the colonies didn’t qualify for monetary autonomy because they lacked bullion. But they only lacked bullion because the colonial ...”

“... richest 62 persons on the planet owned as much private net wealth as the poorer half of humanity, more than 3.5 billion people.’ The disparity is stupefying; it would be hardly less stupefying if Scheidel were off by a factor of, say, two or three, and 124 or 186 individuals had as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population. That the rich ...”

“... As Martines shows, churches were by no means off-limits as locations for murder: the slaying of Thomas à Becket in Canterbury Cathedral might have passed almost without notice in Italy. Indeed, the Pazzi chose as their signal to act the moment when Cardinal Riario elevated the Host: that is, the precise instant when, according to the Catholic faith that ...”

“... of getting students to read mass-market bestsellers.) Why are there no great novelists any more, critics often wail, as they hark back to a golden age of exquisite sentences and profound moral depths. There are no great novelists any more for the same reason there are no longer any sugar plantations in the ...”

“... other historians, sociologists and philosophers of science, notably Paul Feyerabend, Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault and David Bloor. If Latour’s work has caused particular distress, it is at least in part because of his flagrantly cosmopolitan style: witty, imaginative, literate and unrelentingly ironic. For some, all this spells something ...”

“... of dollars to conservatives who support Donald Trump’s bogus claims of election fraud in 2020. Thomas Klingenstein, a NatCon regular, gave $100,000; he is chair of the Claremont Institute, the Californian think tank known as ‘the nerve centre of the American right’. Britain does not have the same culture of political funding as the US, but its ...”

“... happened: she got a bigger office, and share options. She was no longer allowed to travel with more than a few other senior employees, to minimise the loss to the company if the plane went down. And among her new responsibilities, she was ‘invited’ to have ‘voluntary contributions’ deducted from her salary: payments to the company’s political ...”

“... a fire broke out in the state penitentiary in Columbus, Ohio, a wretched, segregated prison where more than 4000 men were packed into a facility built to hold 1500. By the time it was extinguished, 322 prisoners lay dead, and the National Guard was called in to suppress rioting. Among the survivors was Chester Himes, a twenty-year-old black man serving a ...”

“... seem so triumphantly vindicated. English literature is an academic discipline that has grown ever more numerous and ever more dispersed, now that so many of the world’s populations learn English as a second language. To add substantially to its methodologies or to its theoretical understanding is a challenge, but also a ...”

“... Government has been introducing far-reaching reforms. But the economy was not discussed. India has more than a third of the world’s poor. But poverty was not an issue. Congress’s secularism has been challenged by ‘Hindu fundamentalists’. But the Bharatiya Janata, the Party that’s been mounting the challenge, scarcely mentioned religion. The quarrels ...”

“... to acceptance without an intervening period of appreciation.’ For a long time – more than forty years in fact – there seemed no danger that this fate would befall J.H. Prynne: take him or leave him, it didn’t seem possible that he’d ever be acceptable. His name had become, as The Oxford Companion to 20th-Century Poetry put it in ...”

“... journey. The aura of Doing what comes naturally is quite different. There is, first of all, more variety of theme: in addition to the now familiar reader-oriented view of literary interpretation, there are essays on various aspects of theory of language (speech-act theory, irony, rhetoric), on legal theory (interpretation in the law, the concept of ...”

“... or accidental about the environmental depredations in the former Soviet Union. They are no more an aberrant accompaniment of socialism than the familiar evils of political oppression; they were not caused by Russian backwardness or bureaucratic error. Environmental catastrophe, he argues, is exactly what one should expect from an industrialised economy ...”