“... 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 ...”

“... shelves. This came as a shock – I’m still not sure why Marsh escaped me then, except that she may have seemed in some mysterious way more of a grown-up taste than Dorothy L. Sayers or Christie – but being a completist I settled down last year to read all of her books, in chronological order. And then I read or reread two hundred or so by other writers ...”

“... with the express purpose of creating the conditions for the sustenance of life. While it may seem that where some see God, Lovelock sees Gaia (‘Gaia looks after us’), he doesn’t say Gaia is God. He has never claimed that Gaia is sentient, or benevolent, or anything so obviously woo-woo as that. Rather, he maintains that all the evidence ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... river banks; they defecate on the streets; they never look for cover.’ This Churchillian passage may be among his current regrets. Naipaul spent the Eighties in hygienic Wiltshire, and at the end of the decade he was knighted for his services to literature. At this point he went once more to India, and has now published a third book, which ...”

“... the Roman conquerors will relax their vigilance, so enabling her to proceed with her suicide. It may be that Barton has decided, with New Critical severity, that Plutarch is one thing and the play another, that the subtle deception in the Greek account is simply absent from the drama – but can we be sure of this? At IV.xv.25, 49 Cleopatra told the dying ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... monism. Since Nehamas is arguing for the coherence of Nietzsche’s writings, the intention may be to evince the final triumph of critical monism. But since the book also defends Nietzsche’s perspectivism, the view denying that we can aspire to anything more than one among many possible perspectives, I shall contend here that it leaves behind the ...”

“... Armoured Brigade, serving in northern Europe after D-Day and eventually reaching Prague in May 1945, a couple of weeks after the occupying Russians. He quickly sensed that the prospects for his former homeland were not good, and returned to England, resuming his studies in Oxford in January 1946. He graduated with a First in 1947 (allowed to take a ...”

“... So says the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, issued in Tel Aviv on 14 May 1948. Shlomo Sand’s last two books have questioned the document’s assumptions: were the Jews ‘forcibly exiled’ or did they go abroad in search of new opportunities? If they ‘never ceased to pray and hope for their return’, why did so few bother to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”