“... The power of central bankers – about which Edward Luttwak wrote in the LRB of 14 November – arises not just from their control over important aspects of economic policy, but also from the acceptance by the rest of us of what they may legitimately do in the exercise of this control. Until recently, our acceptance of the notion that central bankers should be committed to price stability has been entirely uncritical; and price stability (not low, but zero inflation) is what the European Central Bank will be required to maintain ...”

“... hybrid in culture. It is no accident that he started on a postgraduate thesis at Oxford on Henry James, hardly the most congenial of topics for an English literary leftist, but with an obvious appeal for a student of intercultural relations. His suspicion of fully-fledged systems is also, ironically enough, characteristically English. The most obviously ...”

“... I’ve sat on the lawn reading the Block Prince’s Register and other sources for the reign of Edward III. On Tuesday I took a complete holiday. Taking sandwiches I left college at 8.40 a.m., called for Rowse at All Souls, and walked through the early morning sunshine to the station. There we took the train to South Leigh. It was ten by the time we arrived ...”

“... and splendour when it acts as a vehicle for narrative in its own right: when, as in an Edward Hopper painting, period fashion recedes in favour of a chiaroscuro telling of the hour and the season, and colour co-ordination gives way to a dialogue between the characters and the inanimate tokens of their regrets. Thus at the end of season two we see ...”

“... world, tending to dismiss them as literary constructions. Malcolm deplores the influence of Edward Said on this strand of scholarship, in which all European accounts are reduced, in Said’s words (rather less subtly than in his readings), to ‘a way of controlling the redoubtable Orient’. Whatever its convenience for ideological opponents, Malcolm ...”

“... and theory as ‘exile’ or ‘displacement’, and defined with appropriate terminality by Edward Said in his essay, ‘Reflections on Exile’:Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can ...”

“... of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery. The status of an enslaved man, James Somerset, who had escaped in London and been kidnapped for re-enslavement became a national debate. The decision in 1772 by the lord chief justice that Somerset must be freed terrified the colonists. Edward Long, a ...”

“... an overdone and vulgar fantasy. Yvor Winters said Poe’s was an art for servant girls. Both Henry James and T.S. Eliot used the deadly word ‘provincial’. Auden condemned a sentence from ‘William Wilson’ as vague and verbose, and Aldous Huxley summed up Poe as ‘one of Nature’s Gentlemen, unhappily cursed with incorrigible bad taste ... diamond ...”

“... Parliament, Lord Wedgwood certainly deserves most of the tributes he receives from Robert Rhodes James in a Foreword to this work. On the other hand, even in the Thirties it was optimistic of Wedgwood to suppose that the compilation of biographies of Members of the Commons would necessarily reveal the more admirable qualities of those Englishmen who ...”

“... almost unfathomable. An immense aid to solving many of these problems has come with Charles Edward Lysaght’s new biography. The result of years of dedicated research into public and private archives, and of much valuable testimony from Bracken’s friends and acquaintances, it adds considerably to Andrew Boyle’s study, published in 1974. The ...”

“... An aside in an earlier essay shows that Strachey knew full well what he was doing. Referring to James Mill’s ‘treatment of the evidence’ on Warren Hastings, he added parenthetically: ‘and, in all history, the evidence must be “treated”.’ Selection and excision were necessary to the process of historical reconstitution, and Strachey learned to ...”

“... fought over in recent years. A fierce debate broke out in 1978, when, in his book Orientalism, Edward Said launched an attack on Western scholars and others for viewing the East – particularly the Middle East – through the distorting lens of imperialism and ethnocentrism. Rodinson, polite but critical, takes a more measured view. The great merit of ...”

“... Cabinet, which was where Dawson, the villain of this book, went wrong. Dawson intrigued to unseat Edward VIII (a good thing, as it happened, but none of his business) and was the architect of his newspaper’s appeasement-of-Hitler policy, his belief being that the Empire, in which he took an obsessive interest, was not at that stage fully behind ...”

“... the Macmillan family, though not quite as rich), and young Anthony (known at this point as James) grew up amid commercial and political affluence. He was sent to Westminster, where he was ‘miserable’, and which is recorded in these pages largely as a venue for scarlet fever and a host for the Air Training Corps. Much is made of Benn’s academic ...”

“... the 1920s and had been directed by Yeats. Other founding members included O’Hara, John Ashbery, Edward Gorey and Donald Hall, all recent Harvard graduates in their early twenties, as well as those like Lurie living in and around Cambridge. Older, established poets, such as Richard Wilbur and Richard Eberhart, added gravitas to the enterprise. ‘The ...”