“... eel-like name), who was ‘large, foreign, frightening and ravenous’, according to the historian David Hanlon. Nahn Samwohl was the evil version of the smaller, friendlier-looking freshwater eels worshipped by Pohnpeians. He lived on one of the islands of Nan Madol in a well, connected to other islands by underwater tunnels. Twice a year, in a ceremony ...”

“... This, more or less, is how Present Times begins, and one thing very quickly becomes clear: David Storey likes compound ...”

“... invoked racist stereotypes to point the finger at Conley; the African American press which held out for Conley’s innocence was, in turn, not immune to anti-semitism. The reaction against this internecine warfare, however, helped to promote a black-Jewish civil rights alliance that endured for decades. Forgetting its origins in the case that set black ...”

“... salmonella’). Then there is the long line of sex-scandal casualties: Cecil Parkinson, Tim Yeo, David Mellor (greatly exaggerated, but not his only alleged misdemeanour), Hartley Booth, Michael Brown (though he is a borderline case, since he resigned from office while denying allegations that he had had a homosexual relationship). We should also not forget ...”

“... As a colleague of David Simpson at the University of California and a friend graciously thanked in his acknowledgments, can I pretend to have the disinterestedness necessary to write an objective review of his book? Or, as a reviewer opening with a confession of this sort – what in the lingo of our day is called a ‘full disclosure’ – have I then somehow neutralised my personal stake in such a way that I can offer my opinion as unbiased? Can such reflexivity work to undo the debilitating effects of situatedness? These are the kinds of question that agonise Simpson, who has written Situatedness in the hope of stemming the tide of what he calls, following Andrew Sullivan, ‘azza’ declarations – ‘as a colleague of David Simpson’; ‘as a white, middle-class male’ – in the age of identity politics ...”

“... patient is Jung’s, a disturbed woman not at all underplayed by Keira Knightley. The movie – David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, with a screenplay by Christopher Hampton – opens with a view of her struggling against her captors in a horse-drawn coach (the date is 1904) and being delivered to a posh sanatorium in Switzerland. She goes rigid when ...”

“... the issue planned by Harich and Bloch. At the Central Committee’s bidding, Leipzig University held in April 1957 a two-day conference on Bloch’s philosophy. Predictably its conclusions coincided with Kurt Hager’s. Compulsorily retired at the end of the 1955-6 year, Bloch was now isolated from student life, though by no means disgraced. He retained a ...”

“... idea of flourishing’ which consists of ‘a deep respect for qualitative difference’. This is held to be true of Hard Times in particular, but also of novels in general, which are ‘democratic, compassionate, committed to complexity, choice and qualitative difference’. It is a warmer line to take than the current orthodoxy in literary theory, which ...”

“... themselves as anxious, concerned, generous, philanthropic, benevolent and public-spirited. And it held out the prospect that if they treated their subjects with such unprecedented consideration and condescension, then their subjects might remain loyal and deferential to them in return. In short, this book describes how the royal family, by a mixture of lucky ...”

“... and that government has to depend still more heavily on the governing institutions whose power had held the economy back. Mr Middlemas’s thesis should not be swallowed whole. His account of the aborted crisis of 1911 to 1918, and of the growth of the corporate system which aborted it, seems to me masterly. His insight into the economic consequences of ...”

“... were too forced and frenzied to convince: clever advocacy rather than expressions of deeply-held belief. He helped to shout down Asquith in the Commons in 1911, and his exhortations to Ulster Unionists in the years immediately before the First World War bordered on the treasonable. Yet, while publicly thus partisan to the point of excess, he was ...”

“... example, the hapless intellectuals and talkative professors of 1848, lampooned by Engels and held in contempt by later generations, have been treated more sympathetically in recent work on the revolution. And the historical verdict on the 1850s and 1860s, once a byword for the civic torpor of literary and academic life, has undergone similar ...”

“... in a manner not without resonance today, a culture in which logic, science and formality held sway was giving way to one in which real men could cry. In The School for Scandal, Sheridan exposed the false man of sentiment, not for his expressed beliefs but for his hypocrisy. As O’Toole argues persuasively, Sheridan’s politics were an expression of ...”

“... In​ March, as news coverage narrowed to a single story, the housing barristers in my chambers held their monthly meeting. ‘Everything will close,’ one senior colleague predicted, ‘schools, courts …’ But nothing did. For a strange, vertiginous time, life continued as normal. The streets of London were busy, the museums full of people ...”

“... guild rules and create a new economic sector, chefs challenged the monopoly on selling cooked food held by royally chartered caterers, setting up establishments offering ‘restorative’ meat broths and a few side dishes as medicinal products (Sewell draws here on an important study by Rebecca Spang). The French word for ‘restorative’ is, of ...”