“... Michel Foucault, for once and for now, may stand aside: who is the Raymond Roussel about whom he wrote this, his one real essay into literature? Roussel was a writer, of sorts, of the early 20th century; a man both glamorously rich and mentally odd. His money he spent to the hilt in the furtherance of his oddness, for Roussel laboured to write the most uncommercial works and then paid to have them published ...”

“... imagery could doubtless be tested statistically; more usefully, writers with a visual handicap may be stimulated to stretch the connotations of words. Trevor-Roper quotes Tennyson’s ‘the wrinkled sea beneath him crawls’ as an example of short-sighted imagery, and the translation by the blind poet W.H. Coates of a stanza from Shelley’s Prometheus ...”

“... in nine years, falling from 2.2 births per woman in 1987 to 1.3 in 1996. A demographer somewhere may prove me wrong, but I believe this to be the fastest collapse in peacetime fertility in recorded history (less rapid, but still dramatic falls have been taking place in other states of the former Soviet Union). John Lloyd intends no irony in his title, but ...”

“... right hand, the triumphalist tone returns in the final pages of The American Century: Reagan may have presided over the largest peacetime expansion of the military budget in American history and then imagined that the Soviets and Americans could unite behind his Star Wars Strategic Defence Initiative ‘to repel invaders of Earth from other ...”

“... admirable translation. This is mainly due to a very French preoccupation with abstractions which may leave the pragmatic English reader gasping for air. The fact that the work is in two parts, of which the first – written later – presents the conclusions for which the second part provides the basis, does not help. It is probably rather easier to grasp if ...”

“... is notably inferior), is perhaps his most successful poem, though this somewhat recherché genre may be caviar to the general. (Indeed, if one defines the genre strictly, as Priscilla Bawcutt has suggested – ‘a literary game, in which the competitors vie in verbal and metrical ingenuity ... a kind of sportive warfare’ – the only other example of it ...”

“... by establishing a similar parliament and government in the South was an abysmal failure. Opinion may also have been affected by the fact that the opening of this Northern Parliament was the occasion for a speech by King George V, owing much to his personal initiative and offering an olive branch to the Irish Nationalist tradition that quickly led to a ...”

“... global networks of power directly descended from the age of imperialism. Their political outriders may be cynical hacks, but public support for the fossil fuel status quo is all too real. The carbon coalition seems death-driven, defiant of expert advice. Centrist liberals are loud in expressing outrage, but shrink away when push comes to shove. There are ...”

“... briefly uniting the king with most of his domestic enemies. The revolutionary constitution of 3 May 1791 brought radical reform, Enlightenment ideas and – at last – coherent central authority to the country. This astonishing and brilliant revival of independence and creative energy is the subject of Richard Butterwick’s book. For Catherine, though, as ...”

“... of Prospect, told the New York Times just before the general election that he believed Theresa May could dominate British politics for a generation. Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, wants the Democratic Party, which under Bill Clinton captured ‘Americans’ imaginations about our shared ...”

“... once made life sweet. These I have tried to remind of the excitement of jazz, and tell where it may still be found.The precise nature of the family dynamics that shaped Larkin’s jaundiced views on marriage and parenthood have prompted much speculation. His own most explicit attempt to link his ‘natural fouled-up’-ness to his early childhood ...”

“... prosecution does not intend to rely in presenting its case in court. This ‘unused material’ may well be evidence which could assist a defendant in proving his innocence. It might be a statement taken from someone at the scene of a crime which, in contradiction to another eyewitness, asserts that a defendant was not present, or a report by a forensic ...”

“... How were unpublished sources obtained? How were they authenticated? Where, if anywhere, may they be consulted by other scholars (and if they can’t, why not)?Such a methodological essay might have included some reflection by Chang and Halliday on the history of their project and their motives for taking it on. Chang is the author of the justly ...”

“... of ‘Marxist’. Marx’s works did not inform my youthful years – indeed, incredible as it may appear, I hardly heard of him while studying science, law, economics and history. Serious contact came only from a belated reading of his books, plus some correspondence with the author of Pour Marx, Louis Althusser. Attali comes from the old Jewish ...”

“... In​ 1906, May Aldington, a writer and innkeeper, published a novel called Love-letters that Caused a Divorce. It tells the story of Kitty Yorke, who falls in love with a married man. She abandons her marriage in order to run away with her lover, but eventually, after desertion and long hardship, returns to her husband ...”