“... for the frankness of his self-denigration. ‘Clamence’ explicitly denotes clamans – the false John the Baptist crying in the wilderness: it also, I believe, has overtones of clemency, though in this partial self-portrait Camus in no way spares himself. He set the book as far as possible from the scenes of his equivocal sun-baked epiphanies – not in ...”

“... comment to begin to break down the distinction between ‘realism’ and ‘escapism’, used freely as terms of approval and abuse (often in relation to Britain and Hollywood respectively). John Caughie contributes a sharp set of notes on broadcasting and the cinema, among other things tracing the influence of Scottish ...”

“... odd fish?’ Severn also asked, and Crane’s book is an attempt to answer that question. Edward John Trelawny was born in 1792 and died in 1881. In his later years he was a legendary figure, farouche and craggy, a solitary survivor from an epoch which already seemed fabulously remote: here, living on deep into the later Victorian age was a man who had once ...”

“... 1982 and she had to stop corresponding with foreign Tsvetaeva scholars, though she had done so freely in the Seventies. In 1986, instead of Kudrova’s book, a most peculiar (but politically correct) biography by Anna Saakiants appeared: Marina Tsvetaeva: Pages from her Life and Work (1910-1922). By restricting her purview to those 12 years, Saakiants was ...”

“... defiance of mourning, purchased in the month of August, he might have been expected to perspire as freely as Dr Jaeger could have hoped, particularly since he also kitted himself out with Dr Jaeger’s Sanitary Woollen Braces, Woollen Shirt and Woollen Coat. Plenty to draw out the poisonous vapours there, it might be supposed, but the interesting thing is that ...”

“... at the time in the Congo, no more than 10 per cent would have been infectious. Patients could go freely in and out of the compound; their families lived with them if they chose to. There were schools, and children were examined at regular intervals for the onset of symptoms, which at an early stage are easy to cure. There were workshops, plots of land for ...”

“... writes in the Esperanto of international literary fiction, employing a playful postmodernism that freely mixes genres, from detective fiction to historical romance. Much of Pamuk’s fiction reads like a homage to his Western models: Mann, Faulkner, Borges, Joyce, Dostoevsky, Proust and – in The Museum of Innocence, the tale of a doomed, obsessional love ...”

“... on tariffs, and the cotton and tobacco growers of the Southern states, who wanted to trade freely. The so-called Tariff of Abominations of 1828 nearly provoked South Carolina to break away from the union in the Nullification Crisis; the continuing friction was a contributory cause of the Civil War. The South had Gladstone’s sympathy, because they ...”

“... objectivity which the Chinese government dislikes? Is it perhaps a corollary of the right to speak freely that others have a right to listen freely, and not merely to hear what those who control the media think they should hear? If so, who is to articulate this right and on whose behalf? Are human rights there for ...”

“... the US ‘on the path to World War Three’. Corker is one of a handful of Republicans, along with John McCain and Jeff Flake, who now seem more afraid of what Trump might do to the world than of what he might do to them. What sort of war does Trump risk detonating? The most frightening scenario is war between ‘Rocket Man’ and ‘the Dotard’ (as Kim ...”

“... Baker and now, it seems (though he is regrettably attached to the idea of famous names and dates), John MacGregor. It owes rather more perhaps to the HMIs, who in a series of reports have drawn attention to the devastating consequences of abandoning history in favour of such invertebrate programmes of study as those which go under the name of ...”

“... implications of Blake’s debt to Macpherson’s Ossian. Of Williams’s first trio of writers, John Barrell, on the period 1730-1780, applies theory to practice most fully and intelligently. Barrell’s ‘Equal, Wide Survey’ deals with topics associated with Williams – pastoral poetry and language – but handles them in an unabashed scholarly ...”

“... the obligation of men to perform their political covenants. And it was there that the Levellers John Wildman and Maximilian Petty mounted the fundamental challenge to the constitution that would be rewarded by the abolition of monarchy and the House of Lords two years later. Even the sophisticated qualifications of modern scholarship, which have dwelled on ...”

“... in Roman chapels, to the development of the Maltese tourist industry (the Oratory of Saint John in the Cathedral of Valletta contains his last and greatest masterpiece), but it owed most to Roberto Longhi, the most influential Italian art historian and critic of the 20th century. Longhi provided a convincing account of the artist’s Lombard ...”

“... of a ‘new world-epoch’, but the death of an old one: Natty is in his seventies, and Indian John, as Chingachgook is called by the residents of Templeton, a frontier settlement based on the Cooperstown of the novelist’s childhood, is a sad shadow of the Mohican warrior he once was, especially in the Christmas tavern scene in which he partakes a little ...”