“... and to her. ‘A small Vesuvius,’ she called him. They left Europe for New York to escape the war, then travelled back to Europe during the McCarthy hearings. (In a letter to a friend she calls herself ‘the wandering planet Chris’.) But Blake was already married with a daughter when they met. Stead spent 23 years waiting for his wife to grant him a ...”

“... fact-collecting investigation he excelled in. His letters began in 1673, when his nation was at war with England, and, until the Dutch in 1688 helped England’s Whigs overthrow their Stuart rulers, were punctuated with polite salutes to that dynasty’s patronage; but throughout, politics deferred to higher motivations. It was, Leeuwenhoek ...”

“... we would call post-traumatic stress disorder: as a cavalry officer in Cuba during the Spanish war, he witnessed the slaughter of his herd in an artillery attack and never recovered from the shock. In lieu of old-fashioned reproduction, the Shakers expanded their ranks by recruiting lost souls, as well as ‘orphans and children born out of ...”

“... exit’) an essential part of the process.The second strand is the escalating ‘war on woke’. The government is actively encouraging and facilitating litigation against universities under the aegis of ‘free speech’: anyone who feels their freedom has been infringed – by not being invited to give a talk, for example, or having ...”

“... older writers knew a China devastated by foreign exploitation, the Japanese occupation and civil war; they can also recall the early years of Communism, when ‘people had a sense of mutual trust and understanding regardless of whether they were cadres or Party members.’ In the tiny compass of short stories, most of them – but particularly Gao Xiaosheng ...”

“... is not as Adam Smith but as Thomas Hobbes described it: laissez-faire is a futile and dangerous war of all against all. Markets are frail and fallible phenomena that depend on, among other things, currencies, property rights, legal systems, welfare systems, police forces, contractual norms and monopolies commissions. They will flourish as long as people are ...”

“... Georgian leader, put it on the day Yeltsin announced Presidential rule, smells like a coming civil war. This will no doubt stimulate sales of a book which might otherwise have joined the ranks of dull memoirs by Russian political leaders. Those who buy it – and it is to be recommended because of the interest of the man, if for no other reason – will find a ...”

“... there is to watch Ivan Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-American car-worker from Cleveland, being tried for war crimes he will have committed if he is proved to have been Ivan the Terrible, the notorious execution-chamber guard of Treblinka. And two, this is the Israel of 1988, the year of its 40th birthday celebrations, and of the brutal suppression of the ...”

“... generation, the one that came of age in the Sixties, when she founded and cut her teeth on an anti-war magazine called Viet-Report – the daughter, or even granddaughter generation. She inevitably regards McCarthy’s tours de force in exposing the bad faith of the radicals of the Thirties and Forties with some ambivalence: ‘By withholding pity, by ...”

“... century. Actually he had already made one abortive stab with Memoirs from the Declaration of the War with Spain’, begun in 1746, now first published by John Brooke as an appendix to his edition. The title is misleading, for these are annals of the Hanoverian accession, and don’t get anywhere within hailing distance of Jenkins Ear. The date is ...”

“... was born over a hundred years earlier and – much more important – into a completely different class of society. If Hardy had to make his own way in the world, Cowper was a fugitive from it; having started where such genteel employments as the clerkship in the House of Lords lay open to him, he was driven by invincible nervous depression to carpentry and ...”

“... someone Lurie-readers have met previously: briefly a member of the Corinth English faculty in The War between the Tates, he now stands for the newer American academic professionalism, for its characteristic mid-European impatience with antiquarianism and with the nostalgia for things English. The article makes Vinnie look forward more keenly than ever to the ...”

“... of Chicago? I think it broke down very quickly, at least in the Twenties. After the Second World War the Jews were shocked out of this and turned again to Orthodoxy but no longer the old Orthodoxy – to a sort of suburban religious life without much substance to it. The earlier generation lost their kids to the streets very soon, if not to the world. The ...”

“... English audience was, what the original Greek audience may have been, a comfortable urban middle class, prosperous enough to believe in virtue and true love, towny enough to view the country only as a nursery of picturesque innocence or a theatre of primitive brigandage. The relationship was indeed recognised: but it was now sterile. A century after ...”

“... Warren Smith, hears the sparrows sing in Greek, believes that his best friend, killed in the war, speaks to him from behind the trees in Regent’s Park – and prefers death to doctors. Hearing the dreaded Dr Holmes about to burst into the room, Septimus flings himself ‘vigorously, violently’ out of the window, to be fatally impaled on the railings ...”