“... to carry important meaning in Doctorow’s narratives; in Loon Lake the vagrant hero was given Joseph Conrad’s Polish name; in the more autobiographical World’s Fair the author’s own name was used. Here the hero-narrator is called Billy Bathgate. The allusion is not to the unlovely Scottish mining town but to Bathgate Avenue in Doctorow’s native ...”

“... might suggest was the ‘evidence’ that blacks were not brothers ‘under the skin’. In Julien-Joseph Virey’s popular Histoire Naturelle du Génie Humain (first published in 1801) a profile taken from a sculpture of the bearded Zeus is contrasted with one of an Ibo African with large lips, flat nose and receding brow, and one of an orangutan. Virey ...”

“... Covell’s scholarly, discriminating and curiously detached study of the Cambridge fogeys – Michael Oakeshott, John Casey, Maurice Cowling and Roger Scruton – with side-glances at Shirley Robin Letwin and the conservative potential in Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot. Other than that, some of the conservatives are closer to ...”

“... the diplomats were right for the wrong reasons. Neither side could match the wisdom of a man like Michael Lindsay, guide and adviser to Attlee’s group. Lindsay had lived with Mao and Zhou as a friend and comrade through the years of struggle in Yenan, but saw clearly, at an early stage, the fatal signs of growing dogmatism and arrogance in the new ...”

“... would be no Hamlet or Lear, no Vanya or James Tyrone. His one shot at Shakespeare was as Antony in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film of Julius Caesar (1953), where he amazed many doubters and impressed John Gielgud (his Cassius), by handling the verse as easily as he had muttered and snarled in Streetcar and The Wild One. But he did make movies, like ...”

“... reason’. Aleister Crowley used peyote in his séances. Frederick Madison Smith, the grandson of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon religion, explored it as a possible means of achieving religious ecstasy. Smith also lobbied against the prohibition of the peyote religion, which had grown since the 1890s and was now attracting opposition. After a bill to ...”

“... and the darkness awaited him. In the introduction Ionescu addressed Sebastian by his real name: Joseph Hechter. Born in 1907 in Braila, on the Danube, Hechter had been a reader from the first: Maeterlinck at seven, Daudet, Dostoevsky, Maupassant, Sienkiewicz at nine, Munchhausen at ten, Barbusse, Conan Doyle. He was in love with literature, with the theatre ...”

“... local politics, welfare, infrastructure and architecture, exemplified above all by Birmingham and Joseph Chamberlain, whose dapper personality adds style to the narrative of earnest civic endeavour. All that is uncontroversial. But then after 1890 comes collapse, as the middle classes and intellectuals lose faith in city living and decamp to garden cities and ...”

“... various forms of painterly meaning and production.’ For Buchloh, formalism is encapsulated by Joseph Kosuth’s dictum, ‘the absence of reality in art is exactly art’s reality,’ and historicity by Daniel Buren’s, ‘art, whatever it may be, is exclusively political.’ So, by implication, the ideal of a historicised formalism would be work that ...”

“... no viable ‘moderate’ opposition to Assad, and the US was arming extremists. Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the DIA between 2012 and 2014, confirmed that his agency had sent a constant stream of classified warnings to the civilian leadership about the dire consequences of toppling Assad. The jihadists, he said, were in control of the ...”

“... Yet it is only the two and a half years from July 1914 to Asquith’s fall in December 1916 that Michael and Eleanor Brock have chosen to publish. Even within this period, they tell us, they have excluded most of her musings on her family, as well as lists of many of the guests she entertained so frenetically. On the other hand, the book is plumped out by ...”

“... from the wings in the most recent example of what might be termed American cultural materialism, Michael Bristol’s fascinating Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare. Taylor’s nationality, his co-editorship of the Oxford Shakespeare, to say nothing of his capacity for discovering ‘new’ poems by the Bard (the best-forgotten ‘Shall I ...”

“... law – though analysts might add these to a leader’s toolkit, they are quick to point out, as Joseph Nye does in The Paradox of American Power (2002), that international norms may have to give way to ‘vital survival interests’, that ‘at times we will have to go it alone’ – he should not be excited by his use of violence. National security ...”

“... it, to many, deeply gratifying – fall. That’s exactly what has happened with Going Infinite, Michael Lewis’s new book. Lewis met Bankman-Fried in 2021, at the instigation of a friend who was thinking of going into business with him, and who wanted to know ‘who was this guy?’ Lewis began spending time with SBF at his company’s headquarters in the ...”