“... an institution, a body of texts whose study, from O-level to the highest reaches of academia, is a means of legitimating social advancement and whose production on the stage and on television makes a powerful contribution to Britain’s invisible exports. This ‘Shakespeare’ has the characteristics Roland Barthes ascribes to myth: it turns history into ...”

“... audience, and as a writer rather than a speaker he must resort to stylistic rather than dialogical means. Style is part of Nietzsche’s philosophical project and not a merely ‘literary’ device because Nietzsche does have something to say to his audience. Although ‘it often seems as if the aim of Nietzsche’s writing is to construct ideas that grip the ...”

“... and the Paris Peace Conference, which ensured that the triumph would be squandered. What this means is that it was the dénouement of the First World War that changed everything: a messy, sprawling, disorderly event that spilled out across all attempts to contain it. Its momentous qualities cannot be made to fit into the timeframe defined by a single ...”

“... origin, singularly lacking in semantic pedigree. It may be a variant of ‘pother’, which means a commotion of some kind, or even, according to Merriam-Webster, a ‘choking cloud of dust or smoke’. What follows over the next fifty pages or so of Into the Weeds is often little more than a pother of fleeting references to other people’s ...”

“... torture has been generic rather than exceptional in all branches of the military. This is by no means an exclusively American problem: stories from Deepcut barracks in England suggest that if no foreign enemy is at hand then proxies can be created. The confidential Red Cross report on Guantanamo, details of which became public at the end of November, stated ...”

“... War – more than two million words, if you choose to include the indexes (and he did). By no means all these words were Churchill’s – many came from his research assistants and more than a few from the Cabinet Secretary Norman Brook, who vetted the volumes for the Government and paraphrased sensitive passages. The composition and impact of the ...”

“... to Palestine, where a year later he published his first story, signing it Agnon, which in Hebrew means ‘cut off’. In 1924 he adopted Agnon as his name, and, as S.Y. Agnon, came to be considered a patriarch of modern Hebrew literature. He died in 1970, four years after winning the Nobel Prize. In the wake of this success, between 1966 and 1970, Gollancz ...”

“... Leo Amery’s Birmingham, sixty years or so later, empire did not mean a great deal, to judge by David Cannadine’s memoir of his not very imperial childhood which he appends to his new book. Cannadine’s aim is to answer P.D. Morgan’s challenge to envisage the empire as ‘an entire interactive system, one vast interconnected world’. This requires a ...”

“... big man. Once one recognises what he is up to, all the paradoxes of his character fall into place. David Willey has written a fascinating book, and has done so from the point of view of an agonised catholic liberal. ‘My faith in God is intact,’ he tells his readers by way of preface, ‘but my allegiance to the Roman Church has been suspended while I ...”

“... mind in Whitehall because, while it is implied throughout his absorbing and well-researched book, David Leigh has refrained from going into the historical origins of Whitehall’s almost pathological obsession with secrecy. A young investigative journalist, with a healthy distaste for oligarchy in a country which boasts too much about its imagined heritage of ...”

“... David Selbourne’s The Principle of Duty is described on the dust-jacket as ‘the most comprehensive theory of civic society written in English since Locke’. ‘In English’ is wise: it excludes Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Hegel, Marx and Weber. The claim remains bizarre: Locke did not produce a theory of civil society, comprehensive or otherwise, but an account of our obligations to government or the state ...”

“... lack of complexity is also the reason he lends himself to popularising accounts like this one. David Bather Woods writes in a deliberately non-intimidating style as he takes the reader through the various stages of Schopenhauer’s uneventful life. He was born in Danzig in 1788 and visited London as a teenager, where he made sure to drop in at the Bedlam ...”

“... came naturally to Boswell, less naturally but effectively in the sentences of Adam Smith and David Hume, but at the cost of the reservation of the Scottish tongue for casual, domestic or low-life use. Yet, as Daiches reminds us, with an exceptionally happy choice of quotations, the literary endeavours of the upper class were accompanied by a genuine ...”

“... of leaving the ground. It encourages us to think about the moment at which, or the movement by means of which, an understanding of the world starts to take shape.Woolf’s most vivid description of the experience of leaving the ground occurs in the posthumously published ‘Sketch of the Past’, written in 1939, which evokes in absorbing detail the early ...”

“... makes me think of Chekhov.’ The books have sold more than half a billion copies. I’d say that means Simenon achieved all his ambitions. Being a writer, he was completely miserable about that.As you’d expect, there have been many translations of Maigret into English. The project is not straightforward, as we can see just from looking at the titles. These ...”