“... sat so Martin could walk; Martin walked so Obama could run; Obama is running so we all can fly!’ John McCain, hapless Republican candidate in 2008, charged that his rival was a lightweight international ‘celebrity’, like Britney Spears. To many white liberals, however, Obama seemed to guarantee instant redemption from the crimes of a democracy built on ...”

“... here in the real world, the standard work on him is The Mystical Messiah by Gershom Scholem, whose Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism is cited by Tokarczuk in an afterword as ‘foundational’ to the research she did for her enormous novel. The Sabbateans persisted long after their leader’s apostasy, meeting in secret, studying the Kabbalah, practising their ...”

“... Fleet River, dossing down near Smithfield Market, finds himself following in the footsteps of John Betjeman and his Cloth Fair blue plaque. It’s impossible to get away. Legions of the infamously famous, settling on a pleasantly obscure corner of London in which to ferment quiet subversion, find themselves part of the franchise: the freedom offered by ...”

“... White Malice also discusses Nkrumah’s diplomatic failures – not least his decision to put Major General Henry Templer Alexander, a British officer appointed as Ghana’s interim chief of defence, in charge of overseeing Accra’s diplomatic mission to Léopoldville. Alexander didn’t speak French; he was close to the American ambassador, Clare Hayes ...”

“... This was to prove disastrous. A lot then depended on the leaders of Syria’s opposition. A major meeting was convened in Antalya in southern Turkey. One of the most respected Syrian exiles, Burhan Ghalioun, a Sunni Muslim from Homs who taught political sociology at the Sorbonne, explained his refusal to attend: ‘It is a collection of many of those ...”

“... and 3000 of the rapidly produced 1860 second edition – books offered for sale by the publisher John Murray at the same time included 7600 copies of an account of the Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin and 3200 copies of Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help. From 1860 to 1865, the monthly sales of ‘the book that made the modern ...”

“... had another connection to Jane Elgee before her marriage. In a letter to his son William in 1921, John Butler Yeats wrote of Jane Wilde: ‘When she was Miss Elgee, Mrs Butt found her with her husband when the circumstances were not doubtful, and told my mother about it.’ Butt enjoyed various romances, and was, on occasion, heckled at public meetings by the ...”

“... truth’, defined as ‘a presentation of evidence and conclusions that fulfil the major objectives of biography, but without the revelation of information that would involve the living subject in unwarranted embarrassment, loss of face, emotional or physical pain, or nervous or psychiatric collapse’. He said that the ‘communication and ...”

“... and newspaper headline, impression and chronicle. For the middlebrow modernism of U.S.A., John Dos Passos shrewdly kept those registers apart, offering them separately on the page under the headings camera eye and newsreel. Here they are mashed together, and the effect is distinctly lumpy. There’s a reference to Firbank late in the book and perhaps ...”

“... conclusions. The Bensons are made to tell a story ‘about how modern identity finds some of its major lineaments: how is a life story told, what role does sexuality play in an understanding of the self, and what place is there for religion in personal and social formation?’ But it is never clear how one family can carry such a heavy burden of ...”

“... bands in public performances at that time (the leading English amateur violinist and composer, John Marsh, complained in his journal that Haydn’s symphonies were also becoming too taxing for him). But for all their technical difficulty, Haydn and Mozart’s later symphonies were still written in the vernacular of the high Classical style – they were ...”

“... new poem, and gave the poet a genial thumbs-up. Some years later Hughes told another variation to John Carey, to which he added some Jungian grace notes, and the probably too uncanny touch that the visitor was Hughes himself with a vulpine head. In Poet and Critic, an interesting edition of Hughes’s correspondence with Keith Sagar, we have yet another ...”

“... bookish, self-deprecating urbanity of the older man. By his own criteria, this made Auden a ‘major poet’, that is, one who ‘writes differently in youth, in middle age and when old’. The young poet started poems better than anyone since Donne, but how did the poet responsible for such epochally compelling opening lines as Consider this, and in our ...”

“... the case with Alzheimer’s that illness uncovers truth, it seems both to Murdoch’s husband, John Bayley (‘Puss’), and to her biographer, Peter Conradi, that it did so here. In their view Murdoch’s advancing illness, crumbling away language and reason, laid bare in her an essential impulse toward love. As words broke up, it was the vocabulary of ...”

“... Professor’s House prepares the ground for the later novel, sweeping the path as John the Baptist did for the one to come. In both books, male relationships are the pure and primary ones. The Professor’s House centres on the memories of an ageing historian, Napoleon Godfrey St Peter, and much of the book – the entire middle section, in ...”