“... two terms in residence). I never saw him perform as an actor, earliest of his incarnations, but we may have run across each other in pre-war days, when (as he records in Who’s Who) he was working as office-boy, like myself, in a publishing firm. In the war he had been with the Coldstream (adjutant to a Guards battalion can have been no rest-cure, though ...”

“... in imaginative sympathy Clark’s account of Manet’s Exposition Universelle de 1867: The sketch may be improbably big and overfull of matter, but it pretends all the same to be not quite a picture, not quite finished. The paint is put on in discriminate, sparse patches which show off their abbreviation – puffs of smoke eat into the dome of Les ...”

“... against the view that the appeal of ideologies ought to be explained in economic terms. It may be that both believe that there is no general argument to be had, and that the most one can do is drive Marxists and Whigs out of one position at a time. But both are faced with the awkward question whether the intellectual constructions they attend to ...”

“... of such a meta-principle of scientific reasoning as the conservation of energy. And the same may be said of natural selection. The degree of abstraction in the formulation of highly theoretical constructs makes any parallel with buried treasure inappropriate. Even where we habitually speak, for example, of the ‘discovery’ of oxygen, there are ...”

“... was for democratic socialism, died long before Orwell the man did – died, perhaps, during those May days in Barcelona in 1937, when the Communist boot had stamped so ruthlessly on its own comrades. It wasn’t that Orwell became reactionary, as some of his Left critics said: one can’t imagine him voting for Mrs Thatcher, or supporting her immigration ...”

“... and juster in that it put the general good before self and loved ones – though this last precept may have borne hard on their children. Holcroft’s 16-year-old son and Godwin’s 22-year-old stepdaughter Fanny Imlay both committed suicide after running away from home. Godwin made his own daughter Mary Shelley wretched with his exhortations after the deaths ...”

“... The writer of a lengthy and documented biography expects to be relied upon as an authority. It may be a work of beauty that he is creating, but that is not all that is required of it: there is also an implied contract with the reader that he shall inform truly, as there is with an architect that his building shall not fall down. Thus an awkward hitch or ...”

“... rates; and if you don’t discharge her to a tittle of your agreement, she is gone, and perhaps may never come again as long as you live ... Credit is too wary, too coy a lady to stay with any people upon mean conditions; if you will entertain this virgin, you must act upon the nice principles of honour and without any respect to parties – if this is not ...”

“... narrator, whose attitudes and motives become increasingly sinister towards the end of the book, may be as unreliable a guide to what happens in these stories as he usually is in Hogg’s fiction. He has a hard time making the stories fit the title: each story is a compendium of all three perils, and in the second, two-part story his sententious insistence ...”

“... rights as defined by the European Convention that the Government is pledged to adopt as law. She may be released. Straw’s decision to reject her appeal for parole casts doubt on our continuing adherence to the principle that imprisonment not only punishes but also redeems the crime and rehabilitates the criminal. In the case of ‘nonces’, this principle ...”

“... When the chills and fever subside, they leave behind an enveloping fatigue. But the relief may not last long. The symptoms can cycle back again, sometimes returning like clockwork every day, and sometimes every second or third day. If you’re unfortunate, there are also headaches and muscle aches; vomiting and diarrhoea; weight loss; jaundice ...”

“... case and while they might all rejoice that ‘there will be a place in the globe where Englishmen may be free’ they saw that it came at a terrible price. Franklin was driven out of London. Britain was isolated internationally, trade suffered and men died. The anti-war writers were divided between those like the Radical Richard Price, who saw in America only ...”

“... Even​ if you’ve never heard a single thing Solange has recorded, you might still know that in May 2014, in the lift of a luxury hotel in Manhattan, on the starry, starry night of the annual Met Gala, she took a swing (or several) at her sister Beyoncé’s husband, the rapper and entrepreneur Jay-Z. ‘Leaked’ security camera footage from inside the lift showed a shocked Jay-Z, a flustered bear of a bodyguard, Solange a kung-fu blur and the expressionless statue of Beyoncé ...”

“... prospects? The future, after all, is the place where our prejudices might not work. Psychoanalysis may begin with Freud but what it is about does not. Malcom Bowie and Christopher Bollas have been writing some of the most innovatory psychoanalytic theory of the last few years but out of significantly different traditions. There is an unusual stylishness in ...”

“... Nazianzen’s ‘Soul and Body’, she has the rhetorician pray for the right words, ones that ‘may flourish/Of which mine enemy would spoil me,/Using pleasurehood to foil me!’ But the poem’s own fondness for verbal flourishes isn’t easily disentangled from pleasurehood. Her writing often uses pleasure as a foil; more often, though, it wants to be ...”