“... of The Birth of Steel within a few days. The plot tells how a Medieval alchemist – aptly named Smith – is baffled in his attempts to fashion a steel sword: mocked by his minions, he appeals to Minerva, Goddess of Wisdom, who thereupon enters in majesty and introduces the instruments of modern science. The open-air production took full shape during ...”

“... will sense something odd about such reliance on a vision predating not only David Hume and Adam Smith, but Darwin, Freud, Marx and Durkheim, from an age when genes and the structure of human DNA were undreamt of. Can philosophy really be so timeless? The answer is plainly yes, provided a sufficiently passionate sermon can be extracted out of it, for ...”

“... for its legitimation; and this Euro-Gramscism is its basis. Some years ago, the American Marxist Paul Piconne predicted that if Marxism is to become a meaningful political force in the West, ‘it will have to follow a Gramscian path,’ and that because Gramsci provides ‘a formulation of Marxism free from all the traditional trappings of orthodox ...”

“... to allow bitterness to linger. Two of the poem’s other translators, Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith, describe its ‘exquisitely subtle blend of ferocity and tenderness’. ‘Let my heart preserve me from all hate,’ the narrator intones. He also draws back from some of the more celebratory aspects of racial self-pride, laughing at his own ‘former ...”

“... reactionary, slanderous), The Wizard of Oz (Fleming; exaggerated, unreal) and Mr Smith Goes to Washington (Capra; sickening, meaningless) as he strives to live an everyday American life while observing the prescriptions and instructions conveyed from Moscow. The Potemkin steams up the East River, the masses dance in Union Square on May Day ...”

“... 11 per cent.For half a century we have been hearing that 1929 can never return, most recently from Paul Krugman of Princeton, who proposes the old Keynesian strategy for averting a world depression: cut interest rates, flood the markets with money, and if that fails, ensure that governments create demand. But Japan’s ‘lost decade’ has just seen the ...”

“... him to the work of an obscure photographer she had discovered in Paris (Atget), Ralph Steiner, Paul Grotz, John Cheever, Ben Shahn and, most important of all, Lincoln Kirstein.Evans always acknowledged the role luck played in his life, and nothing could have been luckier than the friendship he formed with Kirstein, whose influence on his career was so ...”

“... Marxism, now editor-at-large for Spiked and a contributor to the Times on topics such as Delia Smith, stopping smoking, and the holiday cottage in Broadstairs he and his wife bought to let for £150,000 in 2006. There’s also the kittenish, aubergine-haired Tiffany Jenkins, whose research, she says, concerns ‘contested authority in the cultural sector ...”

“... the son of the author of Wind in the Willows?A. A nickname: Mouse.Tell the Bede story to Maggie Smith, who recalls some lines she had to sing in revue:Oh, I am the Venerable BedeI can scarcely write and just about read.18 February. Listening to the last movement of Elgar’s First Symphony I’m put in mind of some huge submerged mass coming to the ...”

“... the shortlist, with Naipaul’s A Bend in the River the clear frontrunner. Julian Barnes remembers Paul Theroux, who was judging, saying he would ‘skim out into the pampas’ the candidates he considered non-starters; back from Patagonia, there he sat at the Booker dinner, ‘a polite smile on his face’. ‘I couldn’t help enjoying the ...”

“... and ‘thank you’ part of her vocabulary. But in her first official portrait by Paul Emsley, unveiled in January, her eyes are dead and she wears the strained smile of a woman who really wants to tell the painter to bugger off. One critic said perceptively that she appeared ‘weary of being looked at’. Another that the portrait might pass ...”

“... years in one significant respect: his freedom from adherence to natural fact. That would, as Greg Smith argued in an illuminating recent essay, have set him squarely against one of the main aesthetic assumptions shared by his contemporaries.* ‘Nature is not at all the standard of art, but art is the standard of nature,’ runs one of the aphorisms Herbert ...”

“... that are undimmed in this final volume. There are other works on the same theme, for example, Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (1976) and Ben Wilson’s lively Empire of the Deep: The Rise and Fall of the British Navy (2013), but these shorter works concentrate on high power politics rather than the inner workings of the Royal ...”

“... wrote William Redfield in Letters from an Actor. ‘He is even less gifted than Richard Burton, Paul Scofield, Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud. But he is still the definitive actor of the 20th century. Why? Because he wanted to be.’ Holden’s book never reconciles his notion of Olivier the actor-as-onion with its pages of evidence that the force that ...”

“... on a single, dreadful act that gives them the excuse they need to gun the engines of oppression. Paul Foot London All I have to offer, in this distracted time, are stray thoughts and overheard lines. First, from my 14-year-old son, after several days of bluster about ‘righteous’ war: ‘“Evil” is what you talk about when you can’t explain what ...”