“... of physical powers, above all the power of desire. Yet from the inside the same development may bear a quite different interpretation: as a liberation, a clearing of the mind to take on more important tasks. He goes on to discuss the classic example, Tolstoy, and his supposed decline from the panoramic vitality of War and Peace to the ‘aridity of the ...”

“... Fourteen inches by 11, and weighing six pounds 13 ounces, David O. Selznick’s Hollywood is less a coffee-table book than a coffee table without legs. Its credits ape a blockbuster movie’s: ‘Executive Producer: Robert Gottlieb – Associate Producer: Martha Kaplan’, etc; and its first page opens like cinema curtains on a wider-than-Panavision main title modelled on Gone with the Wind ...”

“... need is to have the already barely manageable ambiguities of Holy Writ compounded, as they are by David Rosenberg and Harold Bloom. To be sure, this response will seem pusillanimous. When believers, Jewish or Christian, read or hear what they take to be Holy Writ, it’s supposed that they respond complacently. But some of them at least respond needfully and ...”

“... the career of H.G. Wells, who ‘remained essentially an Edwardian all his life’, with that of May Sinclair, whose concern with literary form and the representation of consciousness identifies her as a forerunner of Woolf and Richardson. Miller gives an illuminating account of Wells’s The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman (1914), which she quite rightly prefers ...”

“... monastic orders to satisfy her desires. But by allowing anger to vent itself in laughter satire may often be a substitute for, not a summons to, revolution. Rochester’s obscene ‘Satyr on Charles II’ was the work not of a puritan revolutionary but of a privileged fellow libertine, and Private Eye’s fascination with the alleged exploits of ‘Randy ...”

“... will help to reflate the economy of country A. If country A reflates while country B deflates, it may do more to raise output and employment in the market-hungry export industries of country B than in the industries within its own borders. If it reflates alone, while countries B to Z are all busily deflating, its reflation ...”

“... those who distrust government intervention and those who demand it. The effects of this crisis may yet end up being more severe than those of the last great crisis we faced, to which this one is often compared, the financial meltdown of 2008. But there is a similarity: then, as much as now, responses to the policy challenges were shaped by political ...”

“... know,’ I said. ‘It seems to me the government wants us to keep our hearings going, come what may.’‘You’re right, they’re buggers. But this case is a thousand pages. Seventeen witnesses, we’ll never get through it in four days.’‘Then ask the judge,’ I said to him. ‘If she’s not keen on hearing it, nothing I can say will make it ...”

“... emerge.Historical debates have a way of coming back full circle, however. The French Revolution may no longer look like the hinge of world history, but many historians would put the rise of capitalism in that position. Indeed, the ‘history of capitalism’ has become a popular subfield, with its own conferences, journals and faculty positions. The ...”

“... regarded as detritus. Dispersal has cut them off not only from the past, but from the future. They may have some way to go, as detritus, but since the island doesn’t boast a recycling plant, they will remain for the duration what they already are. They constitute the stuff of death rather than the stuff of life. Narrative keeps fresh the capacity for memory ...”

“... Saddam, are able to judge that they ought. Kagan offers an analogy: A man armed only with a knife may decide that a bear prowling the forest is a tolerable danger, inasmuch as the alternative – hunting the bear armed only with a knife – is actually riskier than lying low and hoping the bear never attacks. The same man armed with a rifle, however, will ...”

“... to do with the Enlightenment? According to Brockliss, a great deal. Conventional though Calvet may have been, his correspondence shows that he shared the outlook and principal goals of the philosophes. While he and his correspondents cared more immediately about antiquarianism and natural history, they nonetheless had a serious commitment to freedom of ...”

“... from elsewhere: before 1979 it paid millions to the US for fuel that was never delivered. In May 2010 Iran signed a deal with Turkey, mediated by Brazil, to send a portion of its low-enriched uranium stockpile abroad in exchange for 120kg of highly enriched nuclear fuel rods for the Tehran reactor. The deal ultimately collapsed, however, and talks in ...”

“... the method and purpose of the Brecht we still see on the stage and the bookshelf, a Brecht who may be more profitably confronted when the fiftieth anniversary of his death comes up in seven years’ time.Of all the postwar moments that Brecht could have chosen to die, the summer of 1956 was probably the most piquant. In February Khrushchev had denounced ...”

“... half-crust. (‘That bread alone was worth the journey,’ they probably remark, just as Elizabeth David says of a trip to an out-of-the-way eatery in France.) Art has a morality of its own, and the aesthetics of cooking and eating aspire, in ‘foodism’, towards the heights of food-for-food’s sake. Therefore the Third World can go suck its fist.The ...”