“... of Utopian customs, once arrived at the island finely dressed in gold chains. The islanders took the visitors to be slaves, and assumed that their simply-dressed servants were the emissaries. This kind of inversion is the rocker switch of all moral satire; in Lucian’s Menippus, which More translated, the hero travels to Hades to find that death has ...”

“... he negotiated a contract with Bernard Lintot (who was hoping to buy himself a poet who could rival John Dryden in merit and popularity) for a translation of Homer. This was probably the best deal ever struck by an English poet. The fee for the copyright combined with income from the sale of subscription copies of the Iliad made Pope around £5000. That was an ...”

“... a sense of bitterness: the coup wasn’t the new beginning many had hoped for. When Zimbabweans took to the streets and, in ever larger numbers, to social media to express their frustration, she noticed that they often quoted from Animal Farm, which reminded her of the animal stories her grandmother had told her. Bulawayo’s non-fiction work became ...”

“... Lagerlöf, the Swedish Walter Scott. The film’s success broadened Stiller’s ambitions, and he took Garbo with him to Berlin in search of more lucrative and prestigious contracts for them both. Meanwhile, Garbo’s performance in Gösta Berling caught the attention of G.W. Pabst, who cast her as a virtuous woman forced to the brink of prostitution by ...”

“... No one is conscious of all past moments in their history. The idea is weirdly reminiscent of John Locke. In itself, that is fitting, for it was he who put the word ‘consciousness’ into serious circulation, partly as an alternative to Descartes’s ‘thinking’ (of the cogito). Locke wanted a definition of personal identity, and he found it in ...”

“... small yet reliable magazine Antichrist. This Ravelston – some composite of Sir Richard Rees and John Middleton Murry – was a hedonistic yet guilt-ridden dilettante, good in a pinch, and soft on poets, but too easily embarrassed by brute exigence. Saul Bellow – who has already shown a vulnerability to exigent poets in his wonderful Humboldt’s Gift ...”

“... of the pro-Russian Donbas industrial region was initially named after a Welsh entrepreneur called John Hughes, who set up an iron-smelting works there in the 1870s (Hughesovka gradually mutating into Yuzovka), attracting Greeks, Tatars, Serbs, Bulgarians, Poles, Jews and Russians to work there (Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev moved to the region with ...”

“... it an indeterminacy of meaning which had transcendent, even theological implications. Richards took a grim view of modern civilisation, but considered, ironically enough, that a scientifically-based criticism and psychology could insulate us from the most degrading effects of a scientific-technological society; or, as he quaintly put it, from ‘the more ...”

“... they were from Roosevelt. Churchill thought Truman might be more malleable than FDR, while Stalin took a quick dislike to him after Truman – allegedly – dressed down Stalin’s foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, about the coalition government in Poland. ‘I have never been talked to like that in my life,’ Molotov told the new president, in ...”

“... general during a lull that he had taught the crowd a lesson they would never forget. The general took no notice, and ordered fire to be resumed.’ At one point, the general turned to one of his officers and said: ‘Do you think they’ve had enough?’ He then answered himself: ‘No, we’ll give them four rounds more.’ By the end, the fifty Sikhs and ...”

“... outside, the world that forms the books.Writing about Christie in the LRB (20 December 2018), John Lanchester argued that part of the reason she’s still vastly more read than her contemporaries is that she was less invested in her subjects, and therefore less likely to break ‘the containment field of the detective genre’ by making ideological points ...”

“... conservatives.In the swing state of Pennsylvania (the fifth most populous in the country), John Fetterman, a left-leaning Democrat and a strong supporter of marijuana legalisation and criminal justice reform, defeated a Trump-backed candidate, Mehmet Oz, by 4.6 percentage points, outperforming Biden’s result in the state in 2020; the Democratic ...”

“... Orage made him his assistant at the New Age. This led to his meeting Aldous Huxley, the Sitwells, John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield, Ezra Pound and other writers including the young Slovene Janko Lavrin, with whom Edwin would later edit the European Quarterly. Willa became headmistress of a part-time vocational school offering classes to young female ...”

“... media coverage as well as logistical support the West was giving them. But the Libyans who took up arms against Gaddafi’s Jamahiriyya have sedulously avoided this label, at least when near Western microphones. Religion had little to do with the upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt: Islamists were almost entirely absent from the stage in Tunisia until the ...”

“... as far as possible, he appreciated the work of the other two. Alexander’s concern with Rome took some extremely practical forms. He wanted to straighten the main streets and clear the clutter of stalls away into ‘shopping centres’, as Krautheimer calls them. ‘Three times I’ve ordered that florist away from the porch of the Pantheon’ runs one ...”