“... dilute Catholic influence and loosen their grip on their serf estates. Satirists enjoyed the ‘war between periwigs and whiskers’ but Butterwick writes that ‘the atmosphere of enlightened but deeply emotional patriotism … bridged political divides … This ferment and a change in international circumstances were about to launch the Commonwealth on ...”

“... gave up and unpacked my bags and waited another five years. For decades, the paths that led out of war, destruction and poverty into the safety of life in Europe was a closely guarded secret, the property of smugglers and mafias who controlled the routes and had a monopoly on the necessary knowledge. They conducted their illicit trade out of dingy cafés in ...”

“... of the Depression, fears of postwar stagnation, and the geopolitics of decolonisation and the Cold War. The challenges of growth and industrialisation – the obstacles to achieving them, but also the dislocation and inequality they often entailed – weren’t just a matter of investment, technology and productivity. They were also, in the words of Simon ...”

“... or political theory is here not a matter of empirical interests or even ideologies and parties, of class struggle as such: it constitutes an ontological inquiry into the very possibility for biologically isolated human beings to form groups which can function as historical agencies. Nor is Patron’s preoccupation with violence to be grasped as a merely ...”

“... to Egypt and Europe, met his hero George Meredith, and moved smoothly into bisexual, upper-class Edwardian London circles. He had affairs with the sculptor Ronald Sutherland (Lord Gower, decadent model for Wilde’s Lord Henry in The Picture of Dorian Gray), the theatre designer Percy Anderson, and ‘the Ranee of Sarawak’, Lady Margaret Brooke. He ...”

“... more complicated. Born in Bradford in 1894, Priestley, after extensive service in the First World War and three years at Cambridge, had embarked in the early 1920s on the precarious career of a man of letters, turning his hand to criticism, essays and novels, all written in haste, none enjoying much success. The income from a collaborative work with the much ...”

“... of elementary rights to which we and the rest of Europe signed up in the aftermath of World War Two, the Human Rights Act has become the scapegoat for half the things that go wrong in the state and civil society. A paragraph from the Sun reminds one what rational discourse in this field is up against: ‘Tony Blair was attacked last night for refusing ...”

“... Pompilia, putative daughter of Pietro and Violante Comparini, a moderately wealthy middle-class couple. Shortly after the marriage, Guido, his wife and his parents-in-law moved from Rome to Arezzo. Subsequently the Comparini returned to Rome, claiming ill-treatment by Guido; Violante then publicly confessed that Pompilia was not really her child, but ...”

“... in the ancient imaginaire (so far as images were concerned). As for the heroes of the Trojan War, the myths mentioned in Homer’s Iliad now seemed measurably less important than the ones he missed out: the judgment of Paris, the rape of Achilles’ mother, Thetis, at Cape Cuttlefish in Thessaly, Achilles’ murderous advances towards Hector’s little ...”

“... enrich management and shareholders, and circumscribe worker militancy. Outside the US, as the Cold War raged, management consultants were willing foot soldiers in the global battle for capitalism. A 1960 report by the New York Times exalted the US firms that were ‘aggressively’ packaging and marketing management advice on ‘whatever their specialities ...”

“... including a shipboard ballot had been followed. On this occasion, Prescott plays the working class patriot and statesman in the Bevin mould and does it rather well – exuding an expansive sense of power being within reach at last.1 May 1997. Run into John Eatwell, formerly economic adviser to the hapless Neil Kinnock and now Lord Eatwell, President of ...”

“... and water people,’ he wrote in the Irish World,I am talking to those who mean fight, who mean war and who know what war is. When an enslaved nation can produce men who are brave and daring enough to risk life and to face death for the mere glory of showing that the national spirit still lives, that nation is not dead ...”

“... or Mill’s conception of value, understate central aspects of each: the simple chauvinism of War and Peace, the mysticism in Anna Karenina, the agrarian socialism of the Bell, the declared utilitarianism of On Liberty. The result is to make each sound somewhat closer to their commentator than it really is. His readings of Vico and Herder, the major ...”

“... tempering the true-blue Boston Brahmin birthright which conferred, as he sometimes felt, the first-class soul of the patrician. There isn’t a line that isn’t well-born. Lowell’s writings do not broadcast the conception I am describing, and it is one he would have been ready to mock. Such a rejection lay well within the compass of his ambivalence. He was ...”

“... the streets mourning the first and last to love me. McGreevy had fought in the First World War, seeing active service at Ypres and the Somme, where he was wounded twice. By the time he met Beckett, he already knew Joyce and his circle in Paris and had met Eliot in London. Besides his short book on Jack Yeats and some poems, a few of them masterpieces ...”