“... human type. Most of this comes out very clearly and sympathetically in this little book. But one major factor is missing. Look at his name. Lev Davidovitch Landau was not just a Russian: like many of his brightest pupils, he was also a Jew. Was he really ‘born too late’? Had he been a student in the 1950s, he might not have found a patron such as Kapitza ...”

“... Hillis Miller makes the convincing point that Bloom’s noisily proclaimed debt to Frye (‘The major literary critic in the English language ... a kind of Miltonic figure’) conceals his real obsession with Eliot (‘the abominable Eliot’). Bloom’s whole critical project, which emphasises the struggle for imaginative breathing-space between a poet and ...”

“... the Society’s history in more than six hundred pages, ably translated from German by John Noël Dillon. Markus Friedrich’s volume could be described as relentless, but its barrage of information is a trustworthy basis from which to begin to understand one of the most remarkable products of Counter-Reformation energy. The Jesuits have always ...”

“... approach to the political system and ‘modernisation’, the Blair Government is much more like John Major’s than people have noticed. The attack, both rhetorical and actual, on local government, and particularly on local education authorities, continues. Thus the fate of grammar schools is now to be decided by ‘parents’ – that is, by people ...”

“... William Small was teaching Rhetoric and Belles Lettres to Jefferson at William and Mary. By 1768 John Witherspoon from the Laigh Kirk, Paisley, was basing his Princeton lectures on Blair’s Rhetoric. In 1781 Wither spoon coined the pejorative term ‘Americanism’, by analogy with ‘Scotticism’. Strong connections between Scottish and American cultures ...”

“... and, eventually, illegal material. Michael was subject to a variant of what the psychologist John Suler identified in 2001 as the ‘online disinhibition effect’: the phenomenon whereby computer users feel shielded by the apparent anonymity of the web, encouraging behaviour in which they would not normally indulge in the real world. Like much of what ...”

“... Literary Revival at the turn of the 20th century and delivers incisive judgments on a series of major figures, and the precociously magisterial Short History of Irish Literature (1986). Deane had a Marxist mode that could be abstract but was grounded in his hard upbringing in the Bogside. He put Derry into Derrida and worked with Edward Said. That Ireland ...”

“... friends and colleagues, and who at one point confesses that, liking stories as he does, one of his major motivations in running for office was to give people better stories to tell. One feels that the acknowledgements, like the book, could have gone on for ever: only the firm hand of Bob Gottlieb at Knopf apparently kept the book from being twice as long. As ...”

“... If you take, not the work, but the writer, then the attention seems entirely justified. Three major books on her to appear in the past decade have all been biographies – one by an American, one by a New Zealander, and now one by an Englishwoman. In all of them she appears not only as a writer of some importance in the development of modern fiction, but ...”

“... high) net contribution to the EEC budget, before helping to propel the next major stage of market integration – the Single European Act of 1987 under the president of the European Commission, Jacques Delors – from which she expected British financial services in particular to benefit.It was not long before any such linear prospect ...”

“... lectures, biographies and privy pieces of self-promotion that in our wicked age accompany all major anniversaries – are over. But one key question remains unanswered. How is it possible to like Milton? There is certainly a great deal to dislike. Most people would think of him as an overlearned poet who combines labyrinthine syntax with a wide range of ...”

“... The Darwin scholar, John Greene, once summarised the Darwinian revolution as the triumph of a dynamic and non-teleological structuring of nature over static, teological systems: the triumph of chance and change over design and permanence, the triumph of objectivity in the life sciences, of secularism and naturalism over clericalism and the supernatural ...”

“... the French Republic. Just before the arrests, an English medical student studying in Edinburgh, John Edmonds Stock, had been sent down to London by Watt with a letter to the London Corresponding Society inviting them to mount a similar insurrection. Hearing just in time that he was a wanted man, he disappeared, to resurface later in Philadelphia, where he ...”

“... perhaps of the empire as a whole, is a view of the world as a zero sum game: if the US and other major nations are up, Russia is down. And there are enough examples of foreign states reacting to Russia’s efforts to achieve some market share for its products by creating tariff and other barriers for that belief to have more than a purely pathological ...”

“... was: ‘Gentlemen, the Times is printed – by steam.’ The year was 1814; the proprietor was John Walter II; the new technology was the Koenig steam-driven press capable of over a thousand impressions an hour, against the 250 impressions which was all the old Stanhope iron press could manage; and his tactic of secrecy and confrontation (he was frightened ...”