“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... huge databases and techniques for identifying suspicious accounts and transfers, officials such as Richard Barrett, who heads the UN’s Taliban and al-Qaida Monitoring Team, admit that if al-Qaida mounted another 9/11, the financing would probably not register on the watchdogs’ computer screens. Despite this, in May, the CIA director, Michael ...”

“... Beard is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist in his fifties. But it’s been thirty years since Richard Feynman hailed Beard’s research as ‘magic’ at the 1972 Solvay Conference, and the Beard-Einstein Conflation – the details of which are for obvious reasons left vague, though it has something to do with ‘the interaction of light with ...”

“... at its end as well as at its beginning.’ Britain’s relationship with the other European powers came under scrutiny: what chance victory against Russia or the rising German Empire when Britain had made such heavy weather of defeating ‘a tiny rabble of untrained peasants’ in the Boer War? The question was troubling Parliament, and pressure was put ...”

“... scald craving beggary above the degrees of them both, as is largely seen in the brawling works of Richard Maydeston.’ He thus contributes to the oratory of Protestant dissent which Ted Hughes and Tom Paulin have both evoked as a lost – or at least neglected – strand of the national tradition. Bale blazoned his desiderata as much as he reviled the ...”

“... very level-headed on this question: he notes the mistakes made on both sides, some of which – as Richard Neustadt was the first to point out in his 1970 study Alliance Politics – actually arose from the intimate nature of the exchanges between the two governments and the false conclusions which this assumed intimacy was liable sometimes to promote. But he ...”

“... sure, ‘melancholy’ is a much broader term than ‘depression’, connoting strong imaginative powers (with attendant pleasures) as well as anguish of spirit. But, when all this is conceded, it remains clear that the central reference of ‘melancholic’ is to states of profound depression. The real difficulty is one of style. Burton, as everyone ...”

“... that end. State Security was and remains an internal empire whose rulers, at the height of its powers, were released into an arena of moral nullity. The Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopastnosti, Committee of Social Security, though renamed as such only after Stalin’s death, was the direct inheritor of the past and, until Gorbachev’s reformism disoriented ...”

“... an infuriating wallflower, eavesdropping on the glorious beauty of Shelley’s marriage to Mary. Richard Holmes’s unsurpassable biography, Shelley: The Pursuit, written in the ‘golden years’ of the early Seventies, was the first to rescue Claire from the patronage of the Shelley-worshippers and to introduce her as a political thinker, who not only ...”

“... into a large, variegated higher education system is merely to charge them with lacking divine powers. They were right to put central insistence on a massive expansion. The ‘more-will-mean-worse’ school was inept and unrealistic. Entrance standards had risen sharply since the 1930s. Those gaining A-level qualifications were increasing every ...”

“... offers detailed information about life at Winchester, where Empson’s companions included Richard Crossman, William Hayter, John Sparrow and other future grandees. It was, as he later remarked, ‘a ripping education’, a first-class ticket for life. The next stop was Cambridge, by means of a scholarship to Magdalene. At this optimum moment of ...”