“... As Berlin excellently points out, however, there is no difficulty in seeing how the neo-Hegelians took their thesis, without any incoherence, to be one about human freedom. The claim they are advancing is that if, and only if, we actually follow the most fulfilling way of life shall we overcome the constraints and obstacles to our realisation of our full ...”

“... tones, while falling far short of withdrawing their support for Trump. Listening to Paul Ryan, John McCain, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Orrin Hatch inveigh against the evil of white supremacy, you might have thought they’d just dusted off their copies of Between the World and Me. They can hardly claim to have been shocked by Trump’s response, however. As ...”

“... it’s always good to find new species – but there is no missing the sheer delight Banks took in going about it. Banksian collecting involved tramping, climbing, shooting and fishing. He was a plant hunter as much as he was a collector. Later in life, Banks would get fat and gouty, but in his twenties he was a fit and active sportsman. He also ...”

“... none.Look again at Paradise with the Bouts alongside it. One thing is clear. Whoever it was first took possession of Bosch’s picture – whether they signed a contract or bought it from a dealer – must have known perfectly well what they were paying for. Brilliant improvisation on an old theme. Free, subtle, suggestive variation. Maybe the fantasia ...”

“... me over with pride, as if I were their successful creation.When Petrushevskaya was nine her mother took her back to Moscow. Valentina worked, but the family continued to live in immense poverty, and Petrushevskaya continued to be moved around, from underneath her uncle’s kitchen table to an orphanage, then to a children’s sanatorium. In the sanatorium, at ...”

“... the United States, teaching poetry at various universities and especially at Harvard; in 1974 she took an apartment in Boston. She died in the winter of 1979. So far as appearances go, her life was not dramatic. But one never knows about drama. There was, however, one piece of evidence which suggested drama. In 1970 Robert Lowell published ‘Four Poems for ...”

“... was 11, leaving the family $8 after funeral expenses had been paid. Frost’s mother, Isabelle, took Robert and his sister east from San Francisco to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where they lived initially with her parents-in-law before Isabelle tried – with mixed results – to hold down a job as a teacher. Frost was many things before he was a poet; by the ...”

“... and gave no press interviews until his final decade. All this through a period when artists took over the colour supplements, and the easel painter seemed vieux jeu compared to the collager, silk-screener, installer, conceptualist, video-maker, performer, neon-signer and stone-arranger. There was much art babble, and newcomers were expected to provide ...”

“... people chasing a house and the supply of new homes reached a tipping point, average house prices took off like a rocket, trebling between Tony Blair’s accession and the 2008 crash. (In Tower Hamlets, prices went up three and a half times.) Even allowing for inflation over that period of time (36 per cent) it’s a terrifying increase.The chart only shows ...”

“... discord and certainly underplays the impact it had on McCluskie. Terry McCluskie’s real name is John Terrence Woods. Barbara Woolvine, his mother, who grew up in Liverpool, left school early and by the time she was 16 was managing a café in the holiday town of South-port. Ms Woolvine describes Terry’s real father, Terry Woods, as ‘not a very dependable ...”

“... of 81.4 kilograms, to 279 addresses. Sandd claimed this should take six hours; Leijten said it took eight. For this he was paid a little over 27 euros – not much more than €3 an hour. Sandd promotes the job as a ‘bijbaan’, a bit of work on the side for somebody who wants fresh air and exercise and already has a state pension, is studying or has a ...”

“... oriented itself toward power, not feeling’ – such dichotomies abound, alas; that the ideology took hold, less because men were afraid of women or of the feminine components in themselves – a feminist argument that has always seemed to me persuasive – than because men were afraid of being humiliated by other men in the perfervid economic enterprise of ...”

“... to the burning sun, which sends him blind. One other scene stands out. The hero, Harry Faversham (John Clements), fears he is a coward and having declined to go with his regiment to the Sudan goes native in order to prove himself by working unrecognised to assist his ex-colleagues who have sent him the feathers. To corroborate his disguise as a harmless ...”

“... pattern with Johns. About one fifth of all males in the UK between 1800 and 1850 were christened John and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William. Around 1850, however, the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples rose around the country, so ...”

“... for the march.’ New York is a Democrat city, but also a famous backdrop, and the Republicans took the chance that the memory of 11 September would drown out all protest. They raised a platform at Madison Square Garden on which to parade their anger as a mode of strength; for the first days of the convention, at least, it appeared that the present ...”