“... that they are of the greatest benefit to the least advantaged, philosophers like Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge have sought to apply Rawls’s theory of justice to the whole world. However, they have a dissenter within their ranks, and in a series of articles Mathias Risse has proved an articulate critic of those who seek to exploit the redistributive ...”

“... that sort of thing. ‘Roland W. Hayes, coloured tenor – Can’t see any value in his voice,’ Thomas Edison wrote in 1919, when Hayes tried to record for Edison’s label. When Hayes did record, fronting the money himself, he made a point of recording ‘Vesti la giubba’ from Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. The aria had been recorded several times already by ...”

“... in the very notion of a Reformation image. The movement of religious protest inaugurated by Martin Luther in Wittenberg in 1517 quickly targeted the veneration of images as a damnable superstition, the idolatrous confusion of gross matter with an invisible God who was pure and eternal spirit. The 15th century had seen a great flowering of the visual ...”

“... up leaders it favours. Bongo père et fils were typical. So was Blaise Compaoré, who toppled Thomas Sankara – president of Burkina Faso, and still a hero for young West African opposition activists – in 1987. Sankara was murdered during the putsch and Compaoré went on to run the country for more than 25 years. After an uprising in 2014, French ...”

“... occasionally recalls Salinger’s later stories and, among practising writers, George Saunders and Thomas Pynchon.Barker’s explorations have taken her to 19th-century India and a post-metaphysical future. Yet British banality has retained its allure, and its uses. Her work is full of people called things like Bill and Jim. ...”

“... The prose satires of the Elizabethan Presbyterian author who called himself (or themselves) ‘Martin Marprelate’ had a freewheeling energy. He accosted Elizabethan bishops with words such as ‘bumfeage’ (which probably means something like ‘whip the arse of’) and with such comic success that the ecclesiastical establishment was prompted to enlist ...”

“... from Oxbridge and the capital. ‘Wessex’ now means only the pastoral landscapes of Thomas Hardy, and ‘Mercia’ the nostalgic childhood of Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns. Did, or does, any of this matter? The classic example of a scholar who was convinced it was a matter of the greatest national relevance, and who persuaded his countrymen ...”

“... David Fieldhouse examines how far it promoted economic development or under-development. Ged Martin and Benjamin Kline discuss emigration and identities. John MacKenzie supplies a piece on imperial art. Finally, Marshall, followed by an Australian, an African and an Indian, offer their own, inevitably different, verdicts on Empire’s ...”

“... poet Charles Bukowski mentioned his debt to Fante in his novel Women; Bukowski’s publisher, John Martin of the Black Sparrow Press, set about reprinting Fante’s books. Bukowski, who had been devoted to both books ‘like a man who had found gold in the city dump’ since discovering them by chance in the early 1950s, contributed an autobiographical preface ...”

“... of homosexual fellatio’. Then he cools us down. ‘That is to move too far ahead.’ Thomas Carlyle, another prodigious filler of shelves, reckoned that ‘the history of the world is but the biography of great men.’ The pathos formula perfected by Ackroyd. Carlyle did not enjoy such a smooth passage. ‘Swimming in the Mother of Dead Dogs, and ...”

“... and bulimic vulgarity got the genius it deserved,’ only to write a little later, apropos of Thomas McEvilley’s remark that ‘somehow the age demanded’ Schnabel: ‘the notion that the man is an emanation of the Zeitgeist no doubt matches the artist’s fantasies about himself.’ It also, of course, matches what Hughes has just said about him. I ...”

“... found Nabokov ‘rich in what is given to few writers and poor in what is given to most men’. Martin Seymour-Smith, reviewing Laughter in the Dark, described Nabokov as ‘a kind of Satanic Mantovani, coming into cruel close-up on your screens at the end of the compelling torment to ask (the question mark ironic): “You have been distressed by my ...”

“... it was as though my schoolfellows and I had stumbled into the pages of ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’, ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’ or another of the horrid inventions in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. Led past stacks of disintegrating coffins, from which skulls and yellowing bones spilled across the dusty floor, we were introduced to the crypt’s ...”

“... him. But there are interesting moments when he takes a moral position; for example, when Dylan Thomas, who annoyed him by making assumptions about his relationship with Spender, irritated him further by boasting how well he, Thomas, had done out of a visit to Peter Watson to touch him for money. ‘I thought that was a ...”

“... Paris he abandoned both his mother tongue – and, with it, the Joycean extravagance of what Dylan Thomas called his ‘Sodom and Begorrah’ mode – and the brilliant procrusteanism of his avant-garde writing of the Thirties. Writing now in French, he produced the four nouvelles and the trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, books in which he ...”