“... 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 ...”

“... entertainer who (the words are Professor Kennedy’s) ‘regarded mind and its analytical powers as only a suppressant’. If Cummings had a ‘view of life’, as Professor Kennedy rather insists that he had, it was a fairly superficial and incoherent one – vaguely anti-scientific, and individualistic in the manner of people who have a horror of ...”

“... W. Bush’s national security team, including Michael Hayden, James Clapper, Robert Blackwill and Richard Haass – a who’s who of the foreign policy establishment. This has led to some barrel-scraping on the part of the Republicans. For director of the CIA, Trump has chosen John Ratcliffe, his final director of national intelligence in his first term, who ...”

“... mood. The immediate inspiration of Religio Laici was the work of a French Catholic priest, Richard Simon, who had written a crafty but temperate essay to undermine the basic Protestant position by investigating the obvious corruption of the Old Testament text. Reliance on Scripture as the sole authority for belief was, as he gravely ...”

“... be something in philosophy that counts as ‘getting it right’. In this, it properly rejects Richard Rorty’s model for the future of philosophy (or rather, as he sees it, of what used to be philosophy), the model of a conversation. Unless a conversation is very relentless – for instance, one between philosophers – it will not be held together by ...”

“... the stuff out in heroic bouts of scribbling that tested his physical strength as much as his powers of invention. Wilson’s detractors – and these have not been wanting, either in his own time or since – might be inclined to argue that his talents were mainly physical. At Oxford he made his name as a boxer. He studied in hectic bursts in the lulls ...”

“... himself in the film, he may become aware of the utter futility of exerting all his considerable powers and – I am not exaggerating my sense of compassion – he grows older, weaker, gets pushed aside in his armchair and vanishes somewhere into the mists of time. Kafka quickly dismisses the thought as the product of his own sense of futility. ‘Even ...”

“... the critic John Dennis, John Dyer (the author of the loco-descriptive smash-hit Grongar Hill), Richard Savage, Nahum Tate (the Poet Laureate) and Edward Young (Night Thoughts). For a while, early in his career, Hill acted as secretary to Lord Peterborough, the future honorary Scriblerian; he was also later distantly linked with Bolingbroke, to whom he ...”

“... Kruger outlined his vision in the New Statesman. Britain, he asserted, is ruled by faceless ‘powers that be’ who are ‘not on the side of the British people, but instead serve the abstractions of “human rights”, “international law”, or other signals of middle-class virtue’. Kruger, an evangelical Christian, warned of ‘a new religion’ in ...”

“... labour force, and all productive assets in private hands. ‘Fervent believers in the redemptive powers of shock’, the planners wanted to ‘redeem’ Iraq and to create the kind of ‘truly free market imagined in Chicago classes’. According to Klein, Paul Bremer was dispatched to Iraq precisely ‘to prepare the ground for the introduction of ...”

“... the Irving house, to meet the remarkable talking animal. In 1936 he reached the High Court when Richard Lambert, the editor of the Listener, brought an action against Sir Cecil (Lord) Levita, who was reported to have said that Lambert was ‘cracked’ and ‘off his head’ for publicly stating a belief in a mongoose with ...”

“... with regret, and never gives up the hope of reform, but nowhere does he write as if he agreed with Richard Price, the hero of his father’s generation, about the perfectibility of social man through sheer enlightenment. Rather, he speaks of Price and Joseph Fawcett and others with a tender veneration, as great and good men, perhaps too good for the world. The ...”

“... from Non-Self-Governing Territories – a body that would become a gadfly and goad to the imperial powers as the UN expanded.Bunche was put to other uses, too – including, in 1947, that wretched job of dealing with Palestine. Since Britain was determined to withdraw and threw the problem at the UN, Lie established a Special Committee on Palestine, staffed by ...”