“... the right kind of ideas. If it was an old notion that the philosopher was best fitted to be king, the new twist was that the economist was now disclosed as the real boss. Here was a happy prospectus for Keynes’s own profession, and one borne out by post-war experience. The Keynesian injunction that government had a responsibility to create jobs took ...”

“... man’s damnation: Up the Rebels, To Hell with the Pope, And God Save – as you prefer – the King or Ireland However, one of the most important reclamations of recent years is the group of translations, by Thomas Kinsella, of poems assembled by Sean O Tuama, and brought out in a dual-language anthology called An Duanaire 1600-1900: Poems of the ...”

“... issued under the Great Seal allowing him to seize pirates too, and an even more unusual grant from King William stating that the Adventure Galley and her owners could keep everything she took – no tedious Vice-Admiralty courts and sharing of the spoils, nothing to be given back to the original owners. With these papers and a vessel that gauged 287 ...”

“... but transformed them. Above all, it turned social markers into political ones. That is Richard Wrigley’s contention in his fascinating study of the changing meaning of appearances from 1789 to the Napoleonic period. Right from the start, as the Revolutionaries tried to create an entirely new society, the vestimentary symbols of the Old Regime ...”

“... chemistry, quarrelled with leading figures and advanced slowly. His close friend, the chemist Richard Willstätter, said that Haber’s ‘early failure was complete and of long duration’. Einstein had his doctoral thesis rejected, was turned down as a teaching assistant, and complained in 1901 that he had offered himself unsuccessfully to every ...”

“... whose plot hinged on fearsome resistance to foreign occupation. His first novel, Zabiba and the King, gave a telling clue to his approach to government: at one point, the heroine urges an Iraqi leader ‘to arrest all’ who had known about an assassination plot, ‘as well as all those who may have taken part’. A semi-autobiographical work, Men and the ...”

“... Duke of Gloucester, who represented George V at the coronation) had bowed before the Black king. ‘We of the black race are now free.’ Haile Selassie was, he said, the Black Messiah. Events unfolded from this point in a way that becomes familiar as Subin’s book goes on.Howell was imprisoned by the colonial authorities and while detained wrote The ...”

“... Mixed moments of mythology. Virgil’s Iliad with the Greeks inside the burning city. Was it Troy? King Priam meeting his murderer and calling him a ‘degenerate’, a word I didn’t know in English, let alone in Latin. But I continued construing as far as the Death of Dido. Thirty years before, the late ...”

“... so many millions of dollars adapting this novel. When Ran or ‘Chaos’, a Japanese version of King Lear, opens in London next year, it will doubtless be accompanied by A.K., Chris Marker’s documentary on its veteran director Akira Kurosawa. The plum documentary on the toils of film-making remains, however, Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, a record of the ...”

“... It scarcely matters in these circumstances that one of the best essays in the collection, J.P. Stern’s on Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull in the light of Nietzschean views of metaphor and morality, should be concerned solely with German literature. It is principally by asking what a literary canon is that the editor has sought to give some sort of shape ...”

“... need to communicate them to the reader. Another minor annoyance is the lack of graciousness to H.J.R. Murray, whose great History of Chess of 1913 must be the basis for any subsequent research, and to which Eales’s debt is necessarily great. A handsome tribute in the Introduction does not compensate for the impression given by the text, in which Murray is ...”

“... The pub has become as much a restaurant as it is a place to have a drink. It is owned by Greene King, the brewing company, and run by a Polish woman who lives upstairs. It is full most evenings: customers smoking cigarettes stand on the pavement. One of the barmen is from Stettin – ‘Paris of the Baltic’, as he likes to say – and studied politics at ...”

“... dismissing it as ‘speculative’. After Nealon’s conviction was quashed, the then chair, Richard Foster, apologised and promised the CCRC would do everything it could to prevent anything similar from happening in the future.In 2010, Bob Woffinden wrote in the Guardian that ‘the CCRC has become characterised by pusillanimity and procrastination. It ...”

“... Simone’s singing broadcast not just a new sound but a new time. Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Nat King Cole – great black song stylists who emerged out of the 1940s and crossed over into the commercial white mainstream – succeeded precisely because their tone and diction took race out of their voices; they swung but without soul, which made the songs and ...”

“... with the emphases of Jonson’s The Forest, where the country is praised ‘as an image of the King’s peace’. When set beside ‘anti-courtly’ Spenserian verse, ‘To Penshurst’ and ‘To Sir Robert Wroth’ ‘give the sense of a nation which, whatever its faults, is essentially harmonious and well-ordered and reflects credit on its ...”