“... In December​ 1963, the literary critic, essayist and lyrical memoirist Alfred Kazin filed a field report from an after party for a Commentary magazine symposium ‘on the Negro’. (Symposia on the Negro were popular in the 1960s, helping to keep white liberal panellists occupied and furrowed until the ferocious later phase of Black Power made them all squirm ...”

“... into the darkness, light as a commodity squandered as I had never known it before. 22 May. Reading Frank Kermode’s review of John Haffenden’s life of Empson makes me regret a little that Empson was cut out of The History Boys. In the first version of the play Hector sings the praises of Sheffield where he had been taught by Empson, then recounts to the ...”

“... on the north side, some for a family called Secker who seem to live in the manor house across the field, a romantic rambling house that looks unrestored and has oddly in its grounds an ornate seaside-looking Edwardian clock tower.The Windrush tumbles through the weir on this mild winter morning, but the idyll is deceptive as once, at least, the river has seen ...”

“... of America’s relatively insignificant (and in any case divided) ‘Jewish lobby’. Mann’s frank admission that he cannot explain Israeli-American relations should encourage readers to ponder some of the less-than-rational forces that may underlie US devotion to, even obsession with, Israel. What we can say with some confidence is that this unusual ...”

“... and expert on China, a man who fascinates Steiner and whom he wanted to write about in Frank Kermode’s Modern Masters series, published in the 1970s. Steiner had first seen Needham at a protest meeting against Anglo-American intervention in Korea in 1950, at which the distinguished scientist claimed to have incontrovertible proof of the use of ...”

“... is Robin Hood, who defies the system, who stands up for the little people, who levels the playing field. He takes from the rich to give to the poor. It’s a plan. Taking from the rich to give to the poor has been, is and should be the way forward for an exploited majority against remote, unaccountable concentrations of extreme wealth and power. One word for ...”

“... Gestapo. Paulette, pretending to be Arab, pointed to a photograph of Goering: ‘Look, your own field marshal looks more Jewish than I do!’ They were released. Later, on what he remembers with shame as the Day of the Boot, he and his mother were in a shoeshop when he became terrified that her nose might tip off the Gestapo. He ran out, ready to leave his ...”

“... or any other playwright.”’ And a similarly recommendable though much briefer introduction, Frank Kermode’s to his Riverside edition, confines itself to an elegant review of the play’s problems, chronological, textual and critical. Kermode calls Hamlet ‘the first great tragedy Europe had produced for two thousand years’, but he declines the ...”

“... as though writing were a question of pressing forward over one brow after another in the rolling field of the imagination – make him just as much a Modern as Baudelaire. And more fashionably, they deny the poet any tenure at the centre of the poem. Mark Treharne’s superb English versions of the Illuminations catch these shifts and transections ...”

“... primal scream (Spain 1982); Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ leap over Peter Shilton (Mexico 1986); Frank Rijkaard’s fleck of gob caught mid-parabola towards Rudi Völler’s perm, and Gazza’s tears, and Maradona’s tears (Italy 1990); Roberto Baggio’s penalty soaring over the bar (USA 1994); Zinedine Zidane walking past the trophy, head bowed, having ...”

“... of what precedes or comes after it. Its heroine is a servant, Félicité, one of the excluded whom Frank O’Connor invoked in discussing the genre (‘the short story has never had a hero. What it has instead is a submerged population group’). Flaubert describes the arc of her life – a canvas as broad as a novel – with extreme concision. Large nuances ...”

“... The election was rescheduled for May 2025; Georgescu wasn’t allowed to run. Simion led the field in the first round, but was beaten by Nicușor Dan – the liberal former mayor of Bucharest, who ran as an independent – in the second. The liberals and the international institutions and causes they support – the EU, Nato, Ukrainian resistance to ...”

“... be ‘seen’. These disturbing aspects of existence elsewhere solidify in the tale’s deft and frank, though often ignored, insistence on social realities. We are here in a milieu quite coherently lower-middle-class, that of the ‘alf-bred beggars’ of life – although that social conditioning doesn’t by any means, to my feeling, limit the impact of ...”

“... the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, were to blame for the severity of the pandemic. ‘We must be frank about one of the primary reasons this outbreak spun out of control,’ Azar said.There was a failure by this organisation to obtain the information that the world needed, and that failure cost many lives … In an apparent attempt to conceal this ...”

“... In the last decade Europe has generated a set of thinkers about its integration who command the field, while the US, increasingly absorbed in itself, has largely vacated it. Among these, one stands out. By reason of both the reception and the quality of his work, the Dutch philosopher-historian Luuk van Middelaar can be termed, in Gramsci’s ...”