“... à la Mallarmé, and the proliferation, the infinite extension of form à la Wagner and the novel, may coincide and the coincidence result in compositions of original beauty. But the two aesthetics are also very different, and a possible deconstruction of some of Boulez’s notions might begin here. For isn’t it really one thing to make a composition ...”

“... improving organisational capacity of the SNP during the 1960s; the discovery of North Sea oil; or David McCrone and Steven Kendrick’s elegant theory, which emphasises the role of television in a distinctly Scottish news media, producing a ‘Scottish frame of reference’ for contentious state planning decisions that could be exploited by the SNP.The story ...”

“... racial preoccupations. But no one has yet given Bunche the kind of magisterial treatment David Levering Lewis gave Du Bois. In his new book, Kal Raustiala, who concentrates on Bunche’s work at the UN, admits that he hasn’t done it either. (Writing this essay, I have drawn on all three biographies and on Henry’s edition of Bunche’s ...”

“... the English ‘occluded’ Scotland because they regarded it as integral to the British project may be more attractive than historical because it draws on unionist assumptions she also wants us to resist. Most historians would say that Scotland was ignored as long as it was no threat to wealthier, populous England. Although Elizabeth enabled a series of ...”

“... and Bloom’s faltering response to the prejudice he encounters genuinely heroic. Bloom may lack the ancient military virtues, but he possesses the secular qualities of ‘prudence, intelligence, sensitivity and good will’. And he is kind to animals.– Milk for the pussens, he said.– Mrkgnao! the cat cried.They call them stupid. They understand ...”

“... Dante, Boccaccio, More, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Bayle, Voltaire, Sterne, Diderot, David, Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Warburg, Proust, Kracauer, Picasso and many more, each an extraordinary display of learning. No other living historian approaches the range of this erudition. Every page of Threads and Traces, his latest work to appear in ...”

“... the implications of nuclear warfare. It is only among the non-nuclear minor powers that war may appeal as a rational way of obtaining one’s ends. On the other hand, his prose style is dialectical and reflects the clash of thesis and antithesis in human affairs: as with Oakeshott’s writings, the meaning is not always on the surface. Few in his field ...”

“... reputation rather than the book certainly tends to protect authors, if only in the short term, and may in fact benefit St Aubyn in the case of Lost for Words. Satire is supposed to bite the hand that feeds it, but for a novelist (particularly one who hasn’t been short of critical praise) to savage the world of reviewers can seem a bite too far. One character ...”

“... his personal jeweller for two hundred wrist watches that flashed both cross of Jesus and star of David. Such personal touches were far more Elvis than any of the books that had been recommended to him. Soon life would again be games with lascivious starlets and golden guns and awesome dune buggies. Soon he would be home again and primed for every day’s ...”

“... retrospectively alter the GDP estimate. The number goes on changing for months, indeed years. It may well be that the position is worse than it looks. It may be that it’s better: unemployment fell by 7000 in December, beating expectations, so perhaps the economy is in better nick than 0.1 per cent growth suggests. On the ...”

“... instance, seeks its material in untimely behaviour, an old man falling in love with a young woman (May in December), as in Molière and Chaucer, a philosopher acting like a child, a well person feigning illness. But it is also comedy as a form that brings about the restoration of timeliness through the komos with which such a work usually concludes – the ...”

“... too late. She landed upside down in front of an excited crowd of twenty thousand’ – not, we may assume, looking quite unruffled. West, who wrote a lot of the script for Every Day’s a Holiday and took credit for all of it, bowed in the end to the censors, as a result of which the film was not funny and it flopped. Clothes, for those who could afford to ...”

“... Some murders – and some murderers – seem to disrupt that order more than others. McFeely cites David Baldus’s massive 1985 study of almost 2500 cases prosecuted in Georgia in the 1970s, which showed some remarkable, if scarcely surprising, racial disparities. If the victim was white the death sentence was far more likely to be imposed than if the victim ...”

“... Guardian. He said it would come from journalists he’d worked with there. He was obsessed with David Leigh and Nick Davies, two of the main reporters. ‘Davies is extremely hostile to me,’ Assange said. ‘The Guardian basically double-crossed the organisation in the worst way.’ (The Guardian denies this.) ‘We left them with a cache of cables – to ...”