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“... principled isolationism of the Jeffersonian Republicans, the League of Nations idealism of Woodrow Wilson and the years of Cold War containment – all are framed within an idealistic commitment to ‘liberty’ at home and abroad. It’s a self-satisfied view of America’s global significance which prompts a snort of derision from Chomsky, who takes a ...”

“... in the wilderness, embarked on an improbable search for redemption. Powell’s friend Edmund Wilson claimed that her theme was not love but the Midwestern naif who makes the city his home, ‘without ever … losing his fascinated sense of an alien and anarchic society’. This is true; and there is at times something naive in the naif’s send-up of ...”

“... another’s way!’ In the 1960s Warburg found a less unsuitable focus for his attention in Harold Wilson, having been attracted by the sweep-away-the-cobwebs tone of Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’ speech. Anti-semitism, inevitably, was another reason Warburg felt himself to be an outsider. During his early years ...”

“... the consolations of an essential self. There never was such a thing, for Barthes any more than for David Hume, and we are doubtless all the better for it. What looks like a loss is actually a liberation. Unity is an illusion, and consistency is more a vice than a virtue. Postmodernism is full of personality cults, but they know themselves to be ...”

“... More remarkable, if not so successful in totality, are Bell’s paintings of Lytton Strachey and David Garnett, from 1913 and 1915. The former’s glasses and beard are painted bright yellow in a strange experiment; the latter, a topless portrait, has a mother-of-pearl luminescence to its skin tones, the small dark dots of Garnett’s eyes and set mouth ...”

“... does it work for you? To defend religion’s success is not to defend it. It is to undermine it. David Hume knew this. In The Natural History of Religion, he attacked religion in exactly the way Johnson defends it – as a therapy offering consolation. He secularises religion and demonises secularism, and in doing so, makes Christianity vulnerable where it ...”

“... have played a bad hand well. Going into the 1970 election, he seemed the obvious choice to succeed Wilson as Labour leader, and prime minister, whenever the latter stood down. But after Labour unexpectedly lost the election, the question of entry into Europe again became a live political issue. Jenkins, believing that Britain should be part of what eventually ...”

“... undertakers hover in their closing pages), then at least from the crystal set to iPlayer. David Hendy’s book has the strengths of an insider’s account, packed with detail and anecdotes, shrewd in its assessment of personalities, light on socioeconomic change. Simon Potter’s is more academic and astringent. Potter tends to be critical where Hendy ...”

“... in this study – not only his rapport with Irish-America, but the influence of President Wilson on his policies and tactics. The belief that Dev’s responsibility for and role in the Civil War were minor is more controversial; and even more so is the claim that the sectarianism of the Constitution was justified because it involved a tacit ...”

“... to have fallen on Robert Rhodes James. If so, it is an excellent decision. Meanwhile Mr David Carlton has produced a scholarly, well-written work of some five hundred pages. The author admits very fairly that it is in the nature of an interim verdict since the official records of the 1950s, including the Suez crisis, are closed under the Thirty Year ...”

“... to have ‘diverted’ up to one million dollars of public money to his lifelong friend Helen Wilson and to have slipped John Paul II a ‘personal’ gift of $50,000 on his arrival in Chicago in October 1979, these men were the stars of Italy’s most dramatic political and financial scandal: the affair of the Banco Ambrosiano of Milan and the Masonic ...”

“... its failure to maintain the extraordinary industrial and scientific leadership it once attained. David Edgerton’s book, the more academic of the two, is a brilliant and often very aggressive challenge to a set of assumptions about the recent past. James Hamilton-Paterson, still one of England’s most skilled and alluring prose writers in or out of ...”

“... into a sense of false security by the nature of the notably anodyne Preface contributed by Dr David Edwards, the present Provost of Southwark, to the 1983-85 Crockford, the first to appear under the new dispensation. How it was that they failed to spot any danger signals when Dr Bennett’s manuscript came in remains, however, a mystery. For Dr ...”

“... My 20th Century), class (The Prince and the Pauper, The Prisoner of Zenda), race (Puddn’head Wilson) or even species (Herakles and Iphikles, the immortal and mortal infant twins born of Zeus and Amphitryon). Lawrence Wright grounds what he calls ‘this widespread fantasy’ in other peoples’ studies of separated identical twins: Babies actually do ...”

“... in the late 1960s, are no longer central to his achievement. Cutting It Short isn’t the David Lodge novel that its English title seems to promise; indeed, one of the things that is to be docked – twice, and excruciatingly – by the heroine, who happens to be Hrabal’s mother, Marie, is the tail of a dog. This was the 1920s, and suddenly ...”