“... succeeding generations to alienate the land in question. But they were not allowed to do so for more than a generation – and then a new settlement was needed. The principle that ‘perpetuity’ was forbidden existed before and throughout the reign of Henry VIII. ‘The mischief that would arise to the public,’ a Master of the Rolls later said, ‘from ...”

“... world depended on the spread of democratic republics, that makes him a timely object of study. The more, however, one reads the essays in Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalisation of Democratic Nationalism 1830-1920, the less enthusiastic one feels about the man’s ideas, and the more fascinated by the man. Born in Genoa in ...”

“... In perhaps the most widely read book on the subject, What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2004), Thomas Frank argued that the upheavals of the 1960s generated fears and resentments that allowed issues such as abortion rights and racial equity to eclipse economics. Cowie’s book is both an ambitious history lesson and a contribution to this ongoing ...”

“...  Listen to Emily Wilson discuss Aristophanes with Thomas Jones on Among the Ancients, part of the LRB's Close Readings podcast. Find out more here.When​ Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion released ‘WAP’ in August 2020, ‘conservative’ commentators such as Tucker Carlson expressed outrage that the song might corrupt ‘your granddaughters’; Alyssa Rosenberg in the Washington Post celebrated it as an ‘ode to female sexual pleasure ...”

“... less technical language) as an adjective rather than a noun. You can have a satirical version of more or less anything – a satirical novel, a satirical play, a satirical car advert, a satirical news programme. But it also has some of the characteristics of a literary genre, particularly through the long and various tradition of verse satire. That tradition ...”

“... Partnership says: try throwing them into the air on a windy day, or into a corrie so they disperse more widely, or under a tree on the lower slopes.I should imagine that people who want to scatter someone’s ashes on a mountain, or leave a memorial there, do so because they consider a ‘Memorial Site for Contemplation’ municipal and tame. It’s just what ...”

“... writer, and the South American writer, by virtue of being distant and close at the same time, had more ‘rights’ to Western culture than anyone in any Western nation. He went on to explore the extraordinary contribution of the Jewish artist to Western culture and of the Irish writer to English literature. For them, he argued, it was ‘enough, the fact of ...”

“... better readers than others, whether of books or of reality, better in the sense of ‘truer’, more accurate and more revealing: and may well be helped to be so by being rid of the illusion that as ‘scholars’ they have some easy, advantaged road to the truth.This myth of scholarship seems extra liable to crop up ...”

“... he published in 1964. He sent Bishop a draft of the poem in March 1962, explaining that it was ‘more romantic and grey than the whole truth, for all has been sunny between us. Indeed it all started from thinking about your letter, how indispensable you are to me, and how ideally we’ve really kept things, better than life allows really.’ In her ...”

“... were the ever receding vistas of The Anathemata (1952), his epic about the matter of Britain. As Thomas Dilworth documented in his earlier David Jones in the Great War (2012), Jones saw more active service than any other British writer, all of it as a private, and outlived nearly all his contemporaries, with the exception ...”

“... parts of the vast legislative output, but historians of Parliament focused their lenses very much more narrowly. This rather cosy story of politics and parties received a severe jolt in 1929 when Lewis Namier posed the question why men entered Parliament and answered that, at least in the middle of the 18th century, they mostly did so for reasons that had ...”

“... that passed before the decree expired the military was allowed an orgy of shooting, flogging and more or less arbitrary executions. The Cornhill Magazine put the number of deaths at 439 and of floggings at 600. If this had been all, there would probably have been a transient fuss in England, after which Eyre’s career would have continued to flourish. The ...”

“... argument he’ll step back to concede that a particularly seductive passage might add up to little more than ‘a special effect in prose, controlled by me’. When he expounds his subjects’ thinking from the inside, there are moments of heightened, rhapsodic identification. A chapter of Backroom Boys tracks the process by which two Cambridge students, David ...”

“... and stockpiled, hoping vaguely to put together a kind of literary revue. When I began to think in more narrative terms these parodies proved a stumbling-block, as I found I had to create characters who could conceivably have had memories of, say, the age of Oscar Wilde, Lawrence of Arabia and of Bloomsbury. Hence the Claridge’s couple, Hugh and Moggie. When ...”

“... these realities. He thinks the presence of a Greek ethnarch as head of state made it that much more difficult for the Turkish Cypriots to identify with the new order, and recalls that Archbishop Makarios had told him that his greatest error was in permitting Greek military forces to establish themselves permanently on the island. It is true that Cyprus’s ...”