“... about the ‘true’ writings of Karl Ove Knausgaard, or the huge amount of attention paid to David Shields’s polemic Reality Hunger. Time and again we hear about a new desire for the real, about a realism which is realistic set against an avant-garde which isn’t, and so on. It’s disheartening that such simplistic oppositions are still being put ...”

“... liberation over the last 160 years in the US. By that measure Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Ida B. Wells, Rosa Parks, Bella Abzug, Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, Malcolm X, Del Martin and Harvey Milk were just lowly practitioners of identity politics, which we’ve been told to get over. Shortly after the election ...”

“... five stanzas, ending with a cleverly ironic twist. His aunt Jane sent the poem to her cousin Elizabeth Sherwood Rinehart, who passed it to her mother-in-law, Mary Roberts Rinehart, a popular mystery writer. Ashbery was told his poem had received ‘great acclaim’. Having thus conquered the realm of poetry, for the next few years he turned his attention ...”

“... but all of whom could provide a gateway to lucrative Pentagon contracts. Theranos’s founder, Elizabeth Holmes, even courted Special Operations Command, but this potential liaison was thwarted by the US Food and Drug Administration, which didn’t think much of her blood-testing machine.In an acute diagnosis of the power elite in the mid-20th century, the ...”

“... with side-glances at Shirley Robin Letwin and the conservative potential in Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot. Other than that, some of the conservatives are closer to liberalism than others; some accept, other reject, ideas of a social contract and of natural law; all, to a greater or lesser extent, exalt custom, intuitive morality ...”

“... perceptual and moral insight that it might appear. ‘Against Portraits’ and ‘A Self-Portrait: David’, both from later collections, make such insecurity their theme. The poet prefers here a face half-hesitant, face at a threshold. Still, his poems remain preserved, for reasons given in ‘Against Extremity’, from more threatening instabilities of the ...”

“... himself as a man who has completed his escape from his origins in Croydon. This is all rather like Elizabeth Bennet’s joke when she is asked how she began to love Mr Darcy: ‘I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.’ But in Jane Austen’s moral world, a heroine would not in all earnestness attempt a kind of ...”

“... Papers and Legal Instruments, Published Dec. 24, MDCCXCV and Attributed to Shakspeare, Queen Elizabeth, and Henry Earl of Southampton (1796) is the prosecution case Malone was born to present, and he relishes every one of the 424 pages he takes up in doing so. (‘If he does not overpower his adversaries,’ complained a dashed but still defiant ...”

“... that the first modern act of political terrorism in the region was the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by Irgun Zvi Leumi under the leadership of Menachem Begin; the assassinations of Lord Moyne, the British Minister Resident, and Count Bernadotte, the UN mediator, by Jewish extremists long preceded that of Anwar Sadat by their Muslim ...”

“... threat. With the SNP looking certain to be the main opposition party in the new Parliament, David McLetchie, the leader of the Scottish Tories, pledged to support a minority Labour administration faced with a no confidence motion, much to the consternation of Tory strategists at Westminster and Labour spin-doctors both north and south of the ...”

“... in Buckingham Palace are saying it. Next summer’s Golden Jubilee, marking fifty years since Elizabeth II’s Coronation, will not be the national jamboree and mass outpouring of affection that courtiers remember from 1977. It will be a modest, understated affair: a tasteful celebration for those who want it.In the event, of course, the jamboree was ...”

“... at Louth in October 1536 were duly enforced in the reigns of Henry VIII’s children Edward and Elizabeth. So much for the events. But it is the interpretation of the events which has generated a small shelf’s worth of books and articles on the subject of the Pilgrimage of Grace, of which Hoyle’s is only the latest, if the most accessible. There are two ...”

“... radios, clothing) its population demanded. Our understanding of that national economy owes much to David Edgerton, who in a smart piece on port cities explains that inner-city docks declined not just because of containerisation but also because Britain – like France – was once again growing most of its own food; when imports shot up again in the 1980s (of ...”

“... sets, finessed by fashionable architects, are like parodies of facilities promised for the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. And nobody but the owners can get at them. What could be more empowering than to sit looking at an immaculate rectangle of water, a three-dimensional David Hockney which will never be disturbed by a ...”

“... Molineux) long since lost in the mists. The issue also contains a consideration of the sociologist David Riesman, since no intellectual journal back then was complete without a Riesman snorkel dive; a piece by Paul de Man (remember him?) which begins on the stirring note, ‘Ever since the war, American criticism has remained relatively stagnant’; and an ...”