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“... 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 ...”

“... to Sabine Rewald, by two sepia drawings of his studio windows with the River Elbe beyond by Caspar David Friedrich. The drawings are exact in their rendering of casements, panes and the gradation of light on bare walls, and careful in their delineation of the distant riverbank. The frugal medium and the impersonal quality of the draughtsmanship give you the ...”

“... until 1967 it remained outside all the coalition governments, ostracised thanks by and large to David Ben-Gurion, whose governing slogan was ‘Without Herut or Maki’ (the Israeli Communist Party). Gahal joined the Government for the first time during the crisis of May 1967, when Levi Eshkol was prime minister. Begin had the title of Minister without ...”

“... and everyone. ‘I think I might have psychological problems,’ he says, but of course he has no means of consulting his programmer. He sees an old girlfriend, whom he abandoned 11 years ago – we saw him reading an angry note from her on the plane, so she’s on his mind, and she lives in Cincinnati – but only bewilderment comes of the encounter. Then ...”

“... self. In Cooking with Mud: The Idea of Mess in Nineteenth Century Art and Fiction, David Trotter, the author of several other books about 19th-century writers, proposes what he calls ‘mess-theory’ (and, as a corollary, ‘litter-theory,’ which he regards as the point at which ‘waste’ and ‘mess’ overlap). Trotter’s main argument ...”

“... David Benedictus is the Editor of Readings for BBC Radio’s Book at Bedtime. His Sunny Intervals and Showers is ill-suited for late-night reading, since it is not good to have the mind quickened from torpor by such speculations as ‘What happened to all the water in Noah’s Flood?’ or ‘Can the beatings of a butterfly’s wings start a typhoon?’ or, on a more practical level, ‘Could I have dealt with a mischievous fireball in the kitchen as summarily as that (unnamed) Smethwick housewife who “courageously sent it packing, and suffered nothing more serious than a burnt frock”?’ Still less does it assist slumber to reflect on the implications of that 1990 Sun headline (surely the longest Sun headline ever written) which said: ‘Britain has gone sex-crazy as red-hot lovers rush to do it in the great outdoors, say experts ...”

“... the press that Derek Jeter, the Yankees’ shortstop, a nice, inoffensive boy with cheekbones, the David Beckham of baseball, had promised him that ‘the ghosts would turn up eventually’. The Red Sox were at least spared the indignity of having their misfortunes blamed on some hapless idiot whose glove happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong ...”