“... enlist Modernism as an opponent of the dominant ideology of Englishness. Their argument is by no means facile, but it does encourage some curious distortions. We are told, for example, that Robert Bridges’s editing of the proto-Modernist poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins accommodated their dangerous excess to a ‘prevailing orthodoxy’, and ...”

“... elections and party warfare something which can be called continuous contract. Continuous contract means, simply, the fine measurement of opinion and its careful management by propaganda, together with the creation of a degree of mystification about the political process, in the interests of harmonious government. Mr Middlemas’s third new insight is less ...”

“... in the region of two million pounds, which made him rich by the standards of the time, but by no means fabulously wealthy. Surprisingly enough, it was during the reign of that most dull, dim and dutiful of monarchs, King George V, that royal tax exemption took off. In 1910, when he was eager to conciliate the new monarch at the time of the constitutional ...”

“... Malcolm is the most discreet of editors, never intruding his own views, and this self-effacement means, unfortunately, that we cannot yet be sure what he thinks we have to learn from these letters. He has long been working on a biography of Hobbes; only when it appears will we know what larger conclusions he believes can be drawn from the detailed evidence ...”

“... could be punished for failing to deal with sharks, over which he had no power, surely this crisis means that many political careers, indeed entire political movements, are on the line. By the autumn differences between national death rates ought to give voters all the information they need to determine whether these are the people they want to be making life ...”

“... for instance, but they are more often given to two players, who must listen to each other. By no means all European music is predominantly contrapuntal; much of it is melody with harmony, the kind of music that has the widest popular appeal. Even a complex piece such as a Beethoven symphony will almost always have a main melodic line that you can sing or ...”

“... as his great flaw. For Holroyd, putting on the ‘spectacles of paradox’ was one of the means by which Shaw turned the wounds of a loveless childhood inside out. For Gibbs, his belief that the best ideas begin as jokes was ‘the essence of his genius’ (as Father Keegan puts it in John Bull’s Other Island: ‘Every jest is an earnest in the womb ...”

“... verse does two things superbly. It captures the mental states of its subjects (which often means their desolation or unhappiness), and it shows us that the ideas and artefacts of modernity which we now take for granted seemed exceedingly strange when they first appeared. A preoccupation with history runs through his work. He has used historical ...”

“... had rather to be forced to take up arms.’ The shift in the discipline away from military history means that some historians of the period now ignore the Spanish War of Independence altogether. Ronald Fraser’s Napoleon’s Cursed War will not do much to help resolve the debate over the conflict’s significance. The author, best known for an acclaimed oral ...”

“... Conservative Party in Parliament of many of its malcontents. A small majority is all he needs.This means that Johnson’s election mantra – either get Brexit done with me or you get Corbyn plus two referendums – has political logic on its side, which ‘strong and stable’ never did. A Corbyn government could only be formed with the support of parties for ...”

“... testimony showed, was a third. An excellent investigative report in the New York Times by David Barstow, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner took us back to the origins of Trump’s business ethic: he followed his father in sailing close to the wind, and in learning how to hide evidence under one shell or another. It began with New York housing, in rental ...”

“... Consistencies of craft are a prerequisite of photographic style. By limiting and refining their means photographers assert their identity. A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know ...”

“... about it for long. The idea is new. But it feels old at the same time.’ Here ‘things’ means the woman’s relationship with Jake, who is about to pick her up and drive them to his parents’ house in the country. Of course, a voice in a novel is not necessarily a voice (unless you’re listening to an audiobook) and a voice in a film can also ...”

“... translators are forced to rephrase the passage, to suggest an internal condition. For example, David Grene, whose translation is used in most American universities: ‘My body, too, has felt this thrill of pain.’ After reading Ruth Padel, one would understand, even if one did not know a word of Greek, that the women of Troezen were describing Phaedra’s ...”

“... of earthly things – epidemic disease has been to Euro-American empires. These books – even David Herlihy’s posthumously published account of the Black Death in Europe – are best approached as essays in World History. As Samuel Cohn makes clear in his incisive introduction, Herlihy’s argument that the plague acted as a stimulus to Europe’s ...”