“... at all except as a figment of one man’s amour fou. The exception is the Hazlitt scholar Stanley Jones. In the late 1960s he succeeded in tracing a direct descendant of Sarah’s younger brother, Micaiah Walker. He pursued certain trails this opened up for him, and published his findings about her and her family in his biography, William Hazlitt: A Life ...”

“... be a master builder, and his achievements ranged from the elegant – the Art Deco bathhouses at Jones Beach on Long Island – to the catastrophic: the Cross-Bronx Expressway, which destroyed thriving neighbourhoods and displaced thousands of people. By 1968, when Moses was finally forced from power, the catastrophes had become impossible to ignore. The ...”

“... less could be said of Orrell’s account of the structure of the original Globe and the Inigo Jones designs for indoor theatres. The book’s scholarship, its commitment, its good intentions lie manifestly beyond dispute. However, there are difficulties.The first and most obvious one lurks in the linked notions of ‘reconstruction’ and ...”

“... Men – they put on The Tragedy of Gowrie, a dramatisation of the attempted assassination of King James by John Ruthven, earl of Gowrie, in 1600. It was doubtless based on the official account, The Earle of Gowries conspiracie against the Kings Maiestie of Scotland. James encouraged frequent reprints of this pamphlet, and ...”

“... in The Reluctant Fundamentalist of a form that’s unpopular in Anglophone writing: what Henry James called ‘the dear, the blessed nouvelle’. But the French term reminds us of the currency the novella has had in Europe, and that Hamid has said he was drawn to the genre by way of Camus’s The Fall. This makes things more complicated, not least because ...”

“... Sofia Andrukhovych, Neal Ascherson, Ilya Budraitskis, James Butler, Andrew Cockburn, Meehan Crist, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Peter Geoghegan, Jeremy Harding, Owen Hatherley, Abby Innes, Mimi Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy Smith, Daniel Soar, Olena Stiazhkina, Vera Tolz, Daniel Trilling Sofia Andrukhovychtranslated by Uilleam BlackerOn​  the first day, we hid in the Mins’ka metro station with our dog, Zlata ...”

“... The ‘obstacles to information sharing were more bureaucratic than legal’, David Cole and James Dempsey write in Terrorism and the Constitution, and had little to do ‘with the constitutional principles of due process, accountability, or checks and balances’. But while the government rides roughshod over constitutional principles, it has done ...”

“... loudly, pulled faces and made jokes. After they were convicted, the judge, Mr Justice Kenneth Jones, who sentenced them to be detained during Her Majesty’s Pleasure, wrote to the Home Secretary that ‘neither displayed any real remorse. Their evidence was obviously untruthful. I have no doubt that they both attacked the deceased ... their knives ...”

“... so by her mastery of the context, brilliantly recreating Dora’s milieu – sometimes out of Tom Jones, sometimes from Vanity Fair – in which royalty and politicians mixed with actors and actresses, in a fin de siècle atmosphere heavy with assignation, infidelity, betrayal and revolution. In part she does so by her characteristically skilled control of ...”

“... women stifled by trauma, sexual hypocrisy and desperation could remain patients for life. Alice James suffered continuous hysterical symptoms and died at 43, rejoicing that she had got a disease that would kill her. Talks with a Viennese nerve specialist could only have helped. About a third of Freud’s Women is taken up with the professional women who ...”

“... traced. Fielding, who outraged the critics by plundering contemporary jestbooks, included in Tom Jones the anecdote of a felon mocked from the bench with malevolent puns about hanging, which goes back to a Jacobean source, which attributes it in turn to a 15th-century jester, the possibly apocryphal John Scogin. Yet Dickie also insists that 18th-century ...”

“... states.The most original group of essays here – Asanga Welikala on conservatism; Emily Jones on liberalism; Stephen Sedley on socialism; James Mitchell and Alan Convery on unionism; and Michael Keating on nationalism – deal with the ways political ideologies interact with the constitution. Sedley points to ...”

“... we not rub ourselves with grease and ashes we would not last long.’ We’re not far here from James Fenimore Cooper’s linguistic register in The Last of the Mohicans (‘Are the Hurons dogs, to bear this? Who shall say to the wife of Menowgua that the fishes have his scalp, and that his nation have not taken revenge?’). When Mali’s son Theotiste ...”

“... In a discussion​ of literary brothers Theroux mentions not just Thomas and Heinrich Mann and James and Stanislaus Joyce but Vidia and Shiva Naipaul, ‘both of whom I’d known’. At this moment the notional Jay Justus completely disappears within Paul Theroux, who had a famous if not enduring friendship with V.S. Naipaul, and whose unforgiving book on ...”