“... man-of-letters fustian run alongside intellectual strenuousness and extraordinary powers of explanation and illumination. It is sad to realise that his is no longer a (middle-class) household name. This popularising suggests in flickers what his more formal essays, decidedly not written for the general music-lover, achieve with mastery: an ...”

“... own advisers and to spend his money as he wished. Now Parliament was to take over these essential powers. Henry refused point blank, and passionately. It would be a violation of his Coronation Oath to give away the powers he had received from God (George III used a somewhat similar argument to obstruct Catholic ...”

“... believed ‘low-yield’ nukes would be more effective in deterring ‘emerging nuclear powers like North Korea and Iran’. These new earth-penetrating weapons would have hardened casings (probably made of depleted uranium) enabling them ‘to crash through thick rock and concrete’. Opponents in the Senate argued that repealing the Bill would ...”

“... available to meet such real or imaginary threats. Before the Convention was ratified, the Western powers had intervened episodically to protect co-religionists in the Ottoman Empire, China and elsewhere. But international law did not expressly recognise any remedy against atrocities committed by a government against its own citizens within its ...”

“... deepened, the face was captured by some remarkable photographers, including Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon and Jane Bown, and a string of artists. The vigorous scribble of Feliks Topolski naturally found him a good subject, as did the heroic sculptural instincts of Henry Moore, who drew Auden’s skin from memory on hearing of his death – ‘the ...”

“... and the rapidity with which he etched them, astonished those who were eye-witnesses of his powers. This faculty was early developed – he seemed to perform all his operations without an effort.’ One of the first prints to reveal something of his political animus was Six-Pence a Day, a poster-like appeal against recruitment for the American war in ...”

“... wonder whether his resort to Sarin gas on a small but verifiable scale is intended to make Western powers shudder at the consequences of his regime’s unravelling. It’s clear enough why Obama decided to end Bush-style wars against alleged state sponsors of terrorism. But why did he authorise an aggressive use of drones? Was it, as his supporters ...”

“... honour containing those – Hélène Carrière d’Encausse, Robert Conquest, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Pipes – who did see the fuse peeping out from the foundations and said as much. Indeed, a whole issue (Spring 1993) of the conservative US journal National Interest was largely devoted to a celebration of the Right’s greater prescience in perceiving ...”

“... One woman devoted to the President, however, Doris Kearns Goodwin (following Presidential scholars Richard Neustadt and Eric Larrabee), defends the political virtues of Roosevelt’s ‘management style’. By multiplying advisers he broke free of White House insularity, the argument goes, and was put in touch with diverse – conflicting – points of ...”

“... enough else remained to make the attraction of Judaism and of Jews so irresistible, many emotional powers, all the mightier the less they let themselves be grasped in words.’ Here is that notorious appeal to the ineffable in the Jewish character which is basic to racial theory, whether philo- or anti-semitic. In Freud’s writings this appeal is rare enough ...”

“... and an uncanny end. Against Camillo’s advice in the play, Morgan makes a wild dedication of his powers to unpath’d waters, undream’d shores, but his excess has method in it, however outlandish. As in the poem ‘Heaven’, and the remarkably achieved ‘Alphabet of Goddesses’. Jeffrey Wainright’s Selected Poems are taken from The Important Man ...”

“... been widely influential in Silicon Valley since its publication in 1974. Nozick argues that the powers of the state can’t be justified for anything except the protection of private property. Tax-raising is only permitted to pay for security infrastructure. Everything else – social justice, welfare, redistribution – counts as the workers exploiting the ...”

“... proprietor of the small yet reliable magazine Antichrist. This Ravelston – some composite of Sir Richard Rees and John Middleton Murry – was a hedonistic yet guilt-ridden dilettante, good in a pinch, and soft on poets, but too easily embarrassed by brute exigence. Saul Bellow – who has already shown a vulnerability to exigent poets in his wonderful ...”

“... winner is properly re-elected six years later. He refuses to sign an agreement with the Western powers that would have impoverished swathes of the population, particularly in the formerly industrial regions of the east and south. In response to this decision, protesters, again backed by Western intelligence agencies, occupy the central square, paralysing ...”

“... man wandering around a second-hand market is hardly that of a creative genius at the height of his powers. And Browning didn’t set to work immediately after his transcendent experience on the terrace of Casa Guidi. At Rome in the winter of 1860-61 he spent most of his time in the studio of his friend William Wetmore Story, modelling clay figures, too ...”