“... And the young Auden did seem to fancy himself as qualified to lay down the law to an awed class. When compelled into it he disliked the life of the schoolmaster, but it took him some time to rid himself of such fancies, and the stern expository manner that went with them. The seriousness of whatever law he was laying down would sometimes call for ...”

“... who left school at 13. His brief apprenticeship as a carpenter was cut short by the outbreak of war. He tried his hand at most jobs in the building trade, and at worst had to dig roads: ‘a jack of all trades’, he always says, ‘master of none’. Now 81, he has spent the last two years in and out of hospital with multiple myeloma, a cancer which ...”

“... lie in the 1958 constitution, designed by Charles de Gaulle in the midst of the Algerian war of independence. After liberation, with the military but also constitutional debacle of 1940 in mind, de Gaulle had argued for the creation of a powerful presidency: the head of state should be ‘an arbitrator above political contingencies’, able to call ...”

“... it happens a former student of Lessig’s at the University of Chicago, where he was in the same class as the anti-Trump Republican Liz Cheney. Eastman’s feeble argument – that Vice President Mike Pence was empowered to overturn Democratic slates from contested states – drew on a ‘thin reed of evidence’ from the electoral counts of 1796 and 1800. A ...”

“... of “savagery”’.As the practice became more widespread, tattooing became a marker of class and character. Many references to tattoos survive in administrative and disciplinary records – dockworker registers, criminal reports and newspaper notices seeking runaway servants in the colonies. In 1766, the Pennsylvania Gazette offered a reward for a ...”

“... Joyce was too ashamed of his scarcely literate beloved to introduce her to his intellectual middle-class friends or to a father who had quite other aspirations for him. To be with Nora in Ireland would mean a battle with his father and would badly damage his image; but how long would a girl be faithful if her man kept treating her as a mistress? If they ...”

“... doesn’t warm to) is de Kooning’s new formal language: simpler and simpler basic geometry, at war with worked-up ‘expressiveness’. Merritt Parkway would be a case in point:Despite, or because of, his increasing discomfort with the structural matrix of his style … de Kooning has reduced his pictorial means … There is enough ‘conventional’ de ...”

“... translation of the Annals), ‘and his cheap food policy was successful bait for civilians … War or judicial murder had disposed of all men of spirit. Upper-class survivors found that slavish obedience was the way to succeed.’ Suetonius puts a more generous spin on it: ‘All classes of society regularly benefited ...”

“... Garvey out of America. Similarly, the Hoover who turned his malign attention upon the anti-Vietnam War movement was the same man who had, half a century before, hounded Emma Goldman and John Reed and, later, put Leon Trotsky under surveillance in Mexico. This longevity makes Hoover’s biography a wonderful subject. Powers’s book is painfully neutral and ...”

“... of power – differed in recruitment to office, focus of allegiance, relation to land, role in war, function in learning. Nor was the machinery of power at all alike. The Heavenly Kingdom commanded, in principle and in normal times in practice, an effective monopoly of armed force. The Shogunate did not even control a majority of the military levies in ...”

“... who were able to stay up hours of pleasure ahead. It was like a scene from a Hollywood musical, a class of film I detested for their lack of rectitude, or their dissolution of the unities of time and place to which I was so attached. Nevertheless I had drifted far enough out on thoughts of dancing the night away, and of hearing the milkman on his round, and ...”

“... in office. With this generalised involution has come a pervasive corruption of the political class, a topic on which political science, talkative enough on what in the language of accountants is termed the democratic deficit of the Union, typically falls silent. The forms of this corruption have yet to find a systematic taxonomy. There is pre-electoral ...”

“... remarkable for a clever and ambitious son of assimilated Jews growing up after the First World War in a sophisticated neighbourhood near the Tiergarten. He captured these years in an essay he wrote at the Französisches Gymnasium when he was 17. He had been reading Hegel. The relations between parents and children, he declared, are boringly ...”

“... the sniffiness with which he was viewed by the small, determinedly self-improving black middle class, which wasn’t at first thrilled by the outside world’s interest in some ‘damn nasty Rasta’, all ‘ganja smell and frowsy arm’, as an angry mother puts it. Other characters do impressions of foreign music-business types – ‘You reggae dudes are ...”

“... the Communist Party was becoming an apprenticeship and ‘a practical goal’ for many working-class French committed to another version of society: membership would eventually peak at around one million, with a popular vote of five million. The French party went on to internalise whatever was good about the Soviet model and repress the remainder: as ...”