“... A little strange, that, I thought. But I said, ‘That’s where I’m going, so perhaps I may give you a lift?’ ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘That’s very kind of you.’ And we got into the car and drove off. At first neither of us spoke. I was concerned with joining the stream of traffic in Lower Regent Street. Then he asked abruptly: ‘Are you ...”

“... thing, although cruel leaders of lesser states, faced with the threat of prosecution for genocide, may, it is true, be deterred, they are just as likely to cling ferociously to power whatever the cost in human lives. Stimulated to think ahead, inveterate adventurers may even plot to eliminate any witnesses who might testify ...”

“... volunteers who couldn’t get home – Germans, Austrians, Poles. After the Nazi invasion in May 1940, the French began detaining ‘enemy aliens’: anyone of German (or Austrian or Sudeten) origin, including refugees from the Nazis, was suspect. The drafts of ‘undesirables’ in the summer of 1940 included nearly ten thousand women, hundreds with ...”

“... could not be heard and putting his hand over her mouth. Fox News calls her a ‘loon’ (‘She may very well believe everything she’s saying. That is one of the signs of lunacy, believing something that isn’t real’); Senator Orrin Hatch says she is clearly ‘mixed up’; Donald Trump Jr tweets a crude drawing making fun of her; if the assault ‘was ...”

“... you, to ease the burden of the present, and I in the knowledge that no matter how bleak the moment may be, how futile or helpless it may seem, nothing can prevent our love, nothing can ever come between us.Where another writer might have chosen a more explicitly religious word, like the ‘hereafter’ or the ...”

“... sensibility, on one’s cultural preferences and prejudices, and indeed on one’s politics. There may be a significant difference between getting the life I want and getting the life ‘we’ might want, between a certain kind of possessive, acquisitive individualism and a collective political project (the phrase ‘the life I want’ also implies a stability ...”

“... that the office was lenient to the powerful. ‘Infamous’ sodomites were fewer in number but may have persisted throughout adulthood, pursuing relationships with other adults or taking the passive role. Rocke gives an average age for those men of 39 as opposed to 27, and they often remained unmarried. It is clear that Florence was unusual, though it’s ...”

“... there would be no restraints. ‘You must tell the truth as you see it. However unflattering it may be.’ I wonder, had he lived to read it, if he would have regretted this carte blanche. It’s not that Connon is unfair – he is clearly sympathetic to his subject – but he pursues the truth doggedly, while Nichols himself would twist and distort any ...”

“... with the artist, who had been similarly equipped.                   I may be needing a new cover, signals Cupcake, John Hollander’s secret agent in his marvellous book-length poem Reflections on Espionage:                                      I worry Mostly, though, how having been made ...”

“... followed in 1955, as having grown ‘quite immediately out of’ it. Yet, though the later book may have been conceived as polemical, it turned out to have a more valuable function as a work of exploration. It was nothing less than ‘An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry’. English poetry? There was some confusion in the Movement about a ‘return ...”

“... begins: ‘They were a hangdog-looking pair as they rode into Liphook on that sunny morning in May. One was short and weedy, with bony shanks and a hungry countenance, the other was a little taller and a deal bulkier, but bloated of face and generally flabby. They were dressed in a soiled and tawdry imitation of their betters, and each looked every inch ...”

“... shot in a wood (another recurring JTS image) while pretending to be a pheasant. Killing him off may signify nothing more than Story’s desire to terminate one sequence of comedies before starting on another – the Horace Spurgeon Fenton trilogy drawn from his experiences in the screen trade – but it is hard not to see the means of Albert’s going as an ...”

“... is a culture of narcissism. If you rather admire these people’s attitudes and way of life, you may describe it as a culture of tolerance. If you have mixed feelings, you might settle for the description Charles Taylor suggests: it is a culture of authenticity. Taylor says that we ought neither to boost this culture (in the manner of the truly dreadful ...”

“... attitudes. But the Greek notion of Eros as a tyrannical god who forces people into behaviour which may prove disastrous does not suggest that the lover thinks mainly about power, but rather that he may himself be a victim. Also, attitudes to homosexuality seem to have varied according to social class. Young men of the upper ...”

“... Indeed, given its useful presence, and adopting a strong Fishian historical determinism, one may wonder whether epistemology is among the things grasping us and making politics imaginable. Of course, in a strong determinist world I will never know the answer to this question. I may not even be able to ask it. I wonder ...”