“... While US and European economies faltered, Iran’s soared, buoyed by high oil prices. When Henry Kissinger entreated the shah to freeze oil prices in 1975, he refused, and later cited the US government’s ‘threatening tone’ and ‘paternalistic attitude’. It was time, he argued, for the oil-rich nations of the global South – countries such as ...”

“... the evidently remarkable Ratsimilaho himself, who was probably in his late teens when he rose to power. As a child he had visited England, most likely with his father (‘Captain Tom’), receiving at least a partial education. In the conventional accounts he is presented as an enlightened visionary who sought to bring contemporary science and letters to a ...”

“... was a real necessity for Hitler and the Nazis if they were to attain their first goals of getting power and restoring moral confidence to the nation.There are two things for which almost everyone has been obliged to give some credit to the Nazi regime: recovery and full employment. In the 1930s really up-to-date economists hinted coyly that the Nazi ...”

“... on Flaubert, Hélène Cixous on Joyce, Harold Bloom on Wallace Stevens, J. Hillis Miller on Henry James. Some theorists are slapdash readers, but so are some non-theoretical critics. Derrida is so perversely myopic a reader, doggedly pursuing the finest flickers of meaning across a page, that he exasperates some of his opponents with his ...”

“... fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge. Respectable members of that august institution, including Henry Sidgwick (philosophy lecturer), William Barrett (physicist) and Frederic Myers (poet and classicist), founded the Society for Psychical Research as a means of controlling the investigation of phenomena which looked as though they might fall into dangerously ...”

“... Philadelphia Convention in 1787 were divided over a number of issues: over slavery, and over what power to give the States and the Federal Government and how to balance the powers among them. It is astonishing that the session did not degenerate into a series of nagging arguments and counter-arguments, that the group was able to produce an enduring document ...”

“... The wedding was like a dream outside her power, or like a show unmanaged by her in which she was to have no part. The Member of the Wedding How to account for the vagaries of literary reputation? In the Forties and early Fifties, such disparate, talented young writers as Carson McCullers, Truman Capote and Flannery O’Connor were perceived as kindred; there was a highly publicised vogue of American Southern Gothic writing, abetted by photographs of the very camp Truman Capote reclining on a chaise-longue like a delicious dream of Oscar Wilde’s, and by lurid tales of the erratic, often inebriated behaviour of Carson McCullers, a literary prodigy to set beside Scott Fitzgerald in the previous generation ...”

“... in childbirth; his handwriting was shaky and he blotted his signature. When in the 1590s the poet Henry Lok, anxiously seeking patronage, dedicated sonnets to the great men of the age, he wrote of Robert Cecil’s ‘painefull daies, your many watchfull nights’. He wasn’t exaggerating. Stephen Alford’s All His Spies is an account of a man at the heart ...”

“... favour of a binding arbitration agreement, and the law will lend the winning party the state’s power to enforce the award. What is more, the parties can choose the law by which the arbitrator is to determine the dispute. In commercial arbitration agreements this usually means stipulating which country’s laws are to apply. But there is nothing to stop the ...”

“... What is​ the proper distribution of power between Parliament and the executive? It’s a question raised by the recent High Court decision in Miller v. The Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union. Under Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, a member state must ‘notify the European Council of its intention’ to leave, commencing a two-year period of negotiations on the terms of its withdrawal ...”

“... Henry James was foul about Far from the Madding Crowd when it appeared in 1874. He was a young writer, ambitious, seething, silkily aggressive. There was ground to be cleared, and residents had to be deported. Thomas Hardy, with his knobbly rusticities and merry peasants, would not do. In the Nation, James complained that the novel had a ‘fatal lack of magic’, and was written in a ‘verbose and redundant style … Everything human in the book strikes us as factious and insubstantial; the only things we believe in are the sheep and the dogs ...”

“... 1651. Hobbes compares the predicament of two men who are unable to leave a room. One possesses the power to leave, but has been ‘restrained with walls, or chains’ and thereby disempowered; the other straightforwardly lacks the ability, because he is ‘fastened to his bed by sickness’. According to Hobbes’s analysis, the first man is unfree to ...”

“... abuse at the hands of her father.) And then there is Baxter, contingency personified, who enters Henry Perowne’s life in Saturday through that most random of urban events, the car accident. Trauma, in McEwan’s work, inaugurates a loss of innocence. After the mother’s death, the childhood garden is cemented over, in his first novel, and the ...”

“... played as a young woman. Louisa May Alcott thought Kemble ‘a whole stock company in herself’. Henry James, who recalled hearing her read King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a boy in London, professed himself still waiting some forty years later ‘for any approach to the splendid volume of Mrs Kemble’s “Howl, howl, howl!” in the one, or to ...”

“... not isolate them as such: the cultural conservatism of the autodidact tradition; the emancipating power of great literature, whatever its ideological colouring; and, somewhat undercutting this, the sheer uncontrollability of readers’ responses. The cultural conservatism of autodidact literary taste is abundantly illustrated. Once certain authors acquired ...”