“... A sentimental glow surrounds the Emancipation Proclamation, but in fact, as the historian Richard Hofstadter once said, it possessed all the ‘moral grandeur of a bill of lading’. It contained no criticism of slavery and did not free all slaves; the legal status of at least 800,000 slaves was not affected. The proclamation did not free those held ...”

“... Mechthild of Magdeburg, Angela of Foligno, Marguerite Porete, Meister Eckhart, Henry Suso, Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Teresa of Avila, Marie of the Incarnation and Madame Guyon – what could overlap more completely with my interests? Also, Critchley has written more than twenty books on subjects as various as suicide and David ...”

“... have been translations by David Magarshack (1958), Andrew MacAndrew (1970), Julius Katzer (1980), Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1990), David McDuff (1993), Ignat Avsey (1994) and, most recently, Michael Katz. Apparently there are at least eleven translations into German, nine into French, five into Spanish, and who knows what else.Translators always ...”

“... and the advocates of ‘theory’. Thompson ripped into the other speakers, Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson. The atmosphere, as Sophie Scott-Brown describes in her excellent biography of Samuel from 2017, was already bad. The Ruskin student collective organising the conference wasn’t keen on the theoretical ...”

“... She sent her stories out on a Tuesday and received her rejections by Friday for years, until Richard Crossman, who had become editor of the New Statesman in 1970 after six years in Harold Wilson’s cabinet, liked one of them enough to buy several in 1972. With her first cheque for writing, she bought the children sausages and chips for dinner, like the ...”

“... died in 1703, the pride of his life – three thousand books, lavishly gilded and bound in brown leather – passed to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he had once been a student. The college had scarcely any record of him apart from a reprimand for ‘having been scandalously overseen in drink’, but that no longer mattered. The bequest included ...”

“... shoes, ‘fitted with greatest possible exactitude’, his ‘long white tunic’ and ‘dark-brown Circassian coat’. Byron’s is not the only ghost to be detected here: the cold hearts of his precursors Lovelace and Laclos’s Valmont are evident in Pechorin, who has succeeded in attracting a certain princess. ‘I’ll tell you the whole truth,’ I ...”

“... of the Late Victorian literary and artistic worlds: his maternal grandfather was Ford Madox Brown, his uncle William Michael Rossetti. The only possible career for the children of these classes was that of a genius. Ford’s Rossetti cousins had written Greek dramas at the ages of five, nine and fourteen respectively. It became his duty always to aspire ...”

“... and occasionally ‘leonine’, powerfully felt by men and women, the yellow/honey-brown eyes often described as ‘burning’. This new Stalin has physical grace (despite the limp and the webbed feet) and a ‘detached magnetism’. He is a Caucasian, exotic and mysterious, as a man of secrets should be; a romantic poet of some achievement; a ...”

“... needed salvation.’ In 2009, in a speech at Chatham House, the then chief of the general staff, Richard Dannatt, said: There is recognition that our national and military reputation and credibility, unfairly or not, have been called into question at several levels in the eyes of our most important ally as a result of some aspects of the Iraq ...”

“... Thatcherism becomes a “wasm”, everyone will wonder what all the fuss was about,’ Gordon Brown was still quipping in the LRB in 1989). The Leninists to the left of Labour, meanwhile, were looking at history as a ‘series of repeats’ – crisis, general strike, Winter Palace, here we come – although history suggests that the ‘sharpening of ...”

“... his balls from the waiting cameras. By chance I am reading French and Germans, Germans and French, Richard Cobb’s book on France under occupation in the First and Second World Wars and, on the same day as Tebbit’s letter, come across this: ‘Perhaps homosexuals will always welcome some dramatic turn in national fortunes or misfortunes as an opportunity to ...”

“... they got.’ On 1 May 2003, I heard that 140 American soldiers had died in combat in Iraq. I heard Richard Perle tell Americans to ‘relax and celebrate victory’. I heard him say: ‘The predictions of those who opposed this war can be discarded like spent cartridges.’ I heard Lieutenant-General Jay Garner say: ‘We ought to look in a mirror and get ...”

“... UK expelled a few of each other’s diplomats. Their secret services stopped co-operating. Gordon Brown refused all meetings with Putin. In London, Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, was told by the Foreign Office to sit tight and wait while the UK tried to find a way to extradite the killers through back-channel negotiations. In 2010 she was still waiting. When ...”

“... racialised and gendered histories. We have seen only modest increases in the number of Black, brown and gender non-conforming people among teaching staff. For the most part our intellectual existence remains siloed, with each field of knowledge having its own vocabulary and organised into a discrete ontological formation. In Silencing the Past: Power and ...”