“... in a recent essay in the Times, Douglas Murray, a director of Toby Young’s Free Speech Union, took as a sign of our putative crisis over free speech the difficulty someone who opposes a net zero emissions goal has in becoming a university vice chancellor. As Lord Wallace of Saltaire remarked in the Lords debate on the higher education legislation last ...”

“... and then became disillusioned with it – W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot, for example – took refuge in an artistic flight from reality. Stuart’s work, after the war, became more real. He moved towards, not away from, the terrain of his shame. Other commentators, including Conor Cruise O’Brien, took the ...”

“... 251 days (between 2 March and 7 November) for Covid to claim its first 50,000 lives in the UK; it took 79 days to claim the next 50,000 (between 8 November and 25 January).Both Johnson and his government survived the pandemic, even emerging with some credit after a successful vaccine roll-out. Slowly, normality returned to everyday life, but the behaviour of ...”

“... books concentrate fiercely, and indeed lovingly, on just two households, that of the Reverend John Ames, and his lifelong friend the Reverend Robert Boughton, with flashbacks in Lila into the eponymous heroine’s life before she came to Gilead and married Ames and had a son with him. Gilead takes a strand from Middlemarch and turns it around. Ames, like ...”

“... ships, heaving seas, the swivelling turrets of six-inch guns; our island’s story, often with John Mills. And yet, for all its links with history, its invocation of Drake and Nelson, the grip of the Royal Navy on the popular imagination of Britain is relatively recent, dating from what Peter Padfield refers to as the country’s ‘Navalist ...”

“... forehead at the front, the flukes at the back – and even in the middle. Melville tells us that John D’Wolf, one of his uncles, was in charge of a ship raised clean out of the water by a whale slipping beneath it and then ‘setting up its back’. During his time on the Essex, Owen Chase had a similar experience in one of the ship’s boats, when a whale ...”

“... escapades or of other people’s bad behaviour, a favourite being how, after a performance in John Osborne’s A Patriot for Me at Chichester for which he had been much praised, Alan was sitting in his dressing-room when there was a tentative knock on the door. It was Alec Guinness. He shook Alan’s hand, said, ‘You must be very tired,’ and ...”

“... the market (the other two were Ladbrokes and William Hill). I was a cashier, which meant I took in the bets, made a record of them (using a fairly rudimentary photocopying system) and paid out to the lucky winners. Behind me and a couple of other cashiers sat the manager, a kindly, depressive middle-aged man who sorted all the bets by hand, totted up ...”

“... natural order, Strauss remarked, which the liberal conception of culture had forgotten. Schmitt took these objections in his stride, making a few quiet adjustments in subsequent editions of his work to accentuate the hints of a religious background that Strauss had noted. He also helped Strauss get to France before Hitler came to power. Six months after the ...”

“... of conquest with their in-built drive to the oppression of conquered peoples. Militarism – she took the Incas and Sparta as her examples – was the key to exploitation, a form of foundational violence; hence her revulsion at Germany’s slide into militarism and war. But, she wrote in ‘The Dissolution of Primitive Communism’, there is one thing that ...”

“... London dispatched no less a figure than the chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir John Harding. Within a month of his arrival in 1955, he told the cabinet with brutal candour that if self-determination was ruled out, ‘a regime of military government must be established and the country run indefinitely as a police state.’ He was as good as ...”

“... order), Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, the who what where why when remains unjournalistically unclear. It took DeWitt some time to reply, but when she did, the pair of them began an email correspondence. They are not, on the surface, compatible: he is a tabloid fixer and party animal, an imbiber and ingester; she is a solitary intellectual, weaving quietly at her ...”

“... provoked by the debris, odour and viscid substances did not diminish. Indeed, it strengthened. It took shape as a common perception of the phone box as phobic object or site. Penelope Gilliatt’s plague novel, One by One (1965), begins with an abortive call from a public booth so hot that the caller’s hand leaves a mark on the receiver ‘as though he were ...”

“... in his dispassionate intelligence and arabesques of introspection suggests Proust,’ John Updike wrote in the New Yorker, while the New York Times Book Review announced that ‘a new star has risen in the East.’ Since then, Pamuk has been compared to Joyce and Musil, Kafka and Calvino, and almost never – a further compliment – to the ...”

“... conference, part transitional government, the CNS was meant to be the mechanism that took Zaire into the post-Cold War world of multiparty democracy. The impetus for its decision came in part from the growing conflict in the Kivus. In North Kivu it had begun as class unrest, when mainly Hutu landlords began to evict poor Hutu peasants during the ...”