“... but also of opinion, of trying to read the characters of the dead. I am not a 19th-century scholar, a Brontë expert, a Brontë fan even. A year ago, I was not interested in Charlotte, or her mysterious sisters or feckless brother, or their eccentric father, and I was certainly not interested in her charming publisher or her upright critics. I was not ...”

“... its time, the book has had its admirers – my battered 1970s paperback carries endorsements from Richard Hughes, Naomi Mitchison and C.S. Lewis, and Auden was an early fan. (Auden was a patron saint of lost causes. He was also the only major writer to stand up for Laura Riding.) But mostly, the sort of people who get their opinions published have lashed it ...”

“... These men and women had been noticed before: they were the ‘silent majority’ invoked by Richard Nixon. The speechwriter who coined that phrase, Pat Buchanan, would become the insurgent Republican of the 1992 primaries, and at the 1992 party convention he gave a speech that seems the prototype for Trump’s inaugural. In fact, Trump delivered no ...”

“... accused him of everything from nihilism to ‘terrorist obscurantism’. (A notable exception was Richard Rorty, who understood that persuasion wasn’t Derrida’s purpose, and that he was an heir of system-destroyers such as Wittgenstein, who used ‘satires, parodies, aphorisms’ to subvert the efforts of mainstream philosophy to ‘ground’ its ...”

“... One example can stand for many. The US Environmental Protection Agency, created in 1970 by Richard Nixon, has been responsible – under both Democratic and Republican leadership – for a large share of the improvements we now take for granted in the restriction of toxic chemical release, fuel economy and the safety of drinking water. Trump’s first ...”

“... blankets, sang a refrain: ‘There is hunger in Palestine/there is no hunger in Palestine.’ Richard Cook, a director at UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Administration, said to Azoulay that arbitrary, banal impediments to food supplies were jeopardising the nutritional health of many Palestinians.After 7 October 2023, the Israeli government narrowed its ...”

“... of progressive education. Dai Smith, on the other hand, a man of parts and a wit as well as a scholar – he is the historian of Welsh rugby, and currently Head of English Language Programmes at BBC Wales – has assembled a feast of primary sources. There is the pocket diary of Harry Williams, Raymond’s father, starting in 1919, and also his First ...”

“... where he spends some of the loose change unconsumed by his infamous million-pound barbecue on a Richard Long print, A Smell of Sulphur in the Wind. ‘Technically, the photo was shit. The shitness added power.’ What attracted him was the bleak neutrality of the location – Central Iceland – and the title, which brought back the taste of Corby and the ...”

“... was a correspondent of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens as well as F.O. Matthiessen, the Harvard scholar and cousin of his pupil, who had taken his own life earlier in 1950 under a cloud of threats over his leftist leanings and homosexuality. Pearson was in these years at work on a study of Nathaniel Hawthorne; co-editing with W.H. Auden the five-volume ...”

“... in the country, pines for the specious distractions of the big smoke: ‘The whole point,’ the scholar Philip Drew maintained, ‘is that the contrasts drawn by the speaker, with his exaggerated ideas of savoir vivre, are all reversed by the reader.’ But you don’t need independently to know about Browning’s love for a bustling urban scene to realise ...”

“... which served to distinguish him from his companions (Elisabeth Becker of the Washington Post and Richard Dudman from the St Louis Post-Dispatch). As a Scottish nationalist, he wrote that he found DK’s wish to ‘make new things Cambodian’ quite sympathetic – yet far too crudely and chauvinistically anti-Vietnamese. This sentiment, Kiernan notes, was ...”

“... used his next vacancy to confirm the triumph of neo-conservatism. Robert Bork was a distinguished scholar at Yale Law School before becoming a neo-con hero by firing the Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox when other officials in the Justice Department refused to obey Richard Nixon’s order. He deliberately turned his ...”

“... from his ivory tower. ‘For the sake of the world’, he has decided to make the leap from scholar to activist, in an effort to unseat George W. Bush. He does this in his own bookish way, situating Bush’s foreign policy in a broad historical context and exposing its pathologies without resorting to ‘high moral rhetoric’. Instead of denouncing ...”

“... is late for the scholarship pupil plot in Britain and Ireland. John McGahern, Edna O’Brien, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams: they were all born between the end of the First World War and the early 1930s, and published their stories of class alienation in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It’s a bit late, too, for the middle-class unmarried motherhood ...”

“... needed salvation.’ In 2009, in a speech at Chatham House, the then chief of the general staff, Richard Dannatt, said: There is recognition that our national and military reputation and credibility, unfairly or not, have been called into question at several levels in the eyes of our most important ally as a result of some aspects of the Iraq ...”