“... before he had been provoked either by libel or ‘sustained vilification’. It started at David Frost’s house in July 1975 when Frost (who told the story to Peter Jay) introduced Goldsmith to Wilson and Falkender. Since both Goldsmith and Wilson had, at different times, declared that the Eye was dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism and social ...”

“... We are practically wiped out but we charged and took the Hun trenches yesterday. I stopped a Jack Johnson with my head, and my skull is slightly cracked. But I’m getting on splendidly. I did awfully well. Grenfell died slowly enough from the shell-splinter for his family to rush over and attend. His mother read him poems and Euripides’s Hippolytus, of ...”

“... Liberties’ about the mysterious relationship between Jonathan Swift and his ‘Stella’, Hester Johnson, reads like the script of a play – a legacy of Howe’s year-long apprenticeship at the Gate Theatre in Dublin when she was in her late teens and considering following in her mother’s footsteps.Two of Howe’s books are dedicated to husbands who left ...”

“... whirlwind trip around European thought, with seven and a half pages on Hegel, one and a bit on David Hume and so on. The Monty Python ‘Summarise Proust’ contest, in which competitors had thirty seconds to deliver a précis, springs irresistibly to mind. Like the motion of desire itself, the book drives remorselessly from one author to another, raiding ...”

“... ask when the clothing firm Benetton, by using a photograph on a poster of the dying Aids activist David Kirby, borrowed concern and pity for commercial ends. But the situation is complicated. In other contexts advertising techniques were taken up vigorously by Aids activists. Indeed, a poster was produced showing the same image with the message, ‘There’s ...”

“... twinklers of an hour, provoke my rage’) for Pope himself. Gerrard follows Howard Weinbrot and David Fairer in championing Hill’s biblical odes The Creation (1720) and The Judgment Day (1721) as significant expositions of the sublime in an age addicted to correctness; but the argument isn’t likely to persuade readers confronted by lines as poor as the ...”

“... and Earl Raab’s The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970 (1970) and David Bennett’s The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History (1988), which identify a persistent crackpot fringe on the margins of American politics. Instead, Morone contends that the hardliners have shaped some of the central ...”

“... but not all artists have viewed their trade in this high-minded manner. Jonathan Swift or Samuel Johnson would have been dismayed by this grandiose inflation of their literary hackwork. And who knows how Aeschylus or the author of Beowulf regarded their craft? It would be rash to assume that they thought of it in the same way Shelley did. Not all societies ...”

“... how rapid and total the change has been, and how emboldened the party ought to be. Boris Johnson won the 2019 election with a majority of 80 and 44 per cent of the popular vote. Just five years later, with one constituency in the Highlands still to declare, Starmer’s Labour has won 412 seats – a majority of 175 – while the Tories clung on to ...”

“... literature: ‘effects-based operations’ were defined by the former US air force general David Deptula during the First Gulf War as a means of applying the minimum conventional force to achieve the greatest strategic effect. In US government planning, ‘proxy warfare’ is the preserve of wily enemies, Iran and Russia in particular. The US National ...”

“... and issued in forms determined by the publishing, cultural and academic orthodoxies of the day. Johnson’s 1955 edition is now routinely taken to embody the ideals and blindnesses of the New Criticism, while an editorial commitment to the variant-strewn manuscripts – a kind of ‘choosing not choosing’ (to borrow the title of an influential book on ...”

“... Besides, I had already spent an excellent evening with this fascist general!’ He even stood up David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the state, while missing none of his appointments with Palestinian citizens of Israel. When Meir Ya’ari, the Mapam party leader, asked him about his remarks in Cairo on the right of return, Sartre said: ‘It is impossible to ...”

“... of Orwell because, as I argued in the book, English ‘biography’, since the time of Dr Johnson, has come to imply the portrait of a character. The main business of a biographer has often been thought to be that of ‘getting inside’ his subject, ‘grasping the inwardness’, ‘revealing the true personality’ – in a word, empathy. And this ...”

“... unhappiest real-life casualty until his wives Ruth, Kay and Eden. His first marriage, to Ruth Johnson, took a long time to unravel. She had fallen in love with his quickness. Closer up, Groucho resembled his on-stage character in ways she found disturbing. He could say ‘I want to be alone,’ in a vaguely Slavic basso profundo fine-tuned for ...”

“... or the investor in the transatlantic slave trade. The classic account of industrialisation was David Landes’s The Unbound Prometheus (1969), which argued that economic transformation was rooted in three crucial substitutions: of ‘machines … for human skill and effort’, of ‘inanimate for animate sources of power’, and of ‘mineral for vegetable ...”