“... by those who, understandably, don’t care to hang around the Augustan parish-pump.) But then it may be objected that anecdotes sidetrack us from the real life of the drama. It is true that when Michael Kelly tells us in his Reminiscences about Mozart playing billiards or drinking punch, this doesn’t take us any nearer the creative heart of Figaro. But it ...”

“... one of the rich resources of the genre, as have secondary suggestions that the revered ancients may after all have been as ignoble as their modern avatars. What grates in Logue’s version is the nervous overemphasis. Something is being proved by overkill and the fact diverts attention from the poem, old or new, to the jumpy performing tricks of the ...”

“... postcode: Herscht 07769, ‘signalling, as it were, the confidential nature of this matter’. He may as well be naming a quasar or a galaxy.At the post office, Herr Volkenant and his wife, Jessica, warn Herscht that he is throwing away his eighty cents each time. Like almost everyone in Kana, they’re protective of the soft-headed ‘kid grown to giant ...”

“... who just won’t do what we’re told. That’s probably a good thing, though future events may of course provide exceptions to that general rule.Even if​ Daston can sometimes make us seem less pre-modern in our thinking than we are, this is nonetheless a book for our times. It reminds us that developed societies within wide and uniform territories ...”

“... his view of Macron’s presidency. Whoever was responsible for Moret’s arrest – and it may well have been Darmanin – has pressed the right button: the thought is as good as the deed. At rallies and marches, physical policing à la Darmanin, with its bristling ranks of law enforcers, feels more intimidating than his taste for ...”

“... cast of martyrs – became their supreme reference. This changed rather abruptly after 1891, when May Day parades, whose political origins lay in demonstrations in favour of an eight-hour working day, were endorsed by the Second International as a global working-class festival. The anniversary of the Commune, 18 March, was gradually replaced as the main ...”

“... for a surname, ‘the dullest person I ever met,’ Saltzman said, ‘was called Palmer.’ There may be another reason that the name Harry popped into Caine’s head. He was, he says, halfway through reading The Ipcress File when Saltzman asked if he’d like to star in it. And quite near the beginning, the narrator is at Rome airport, ‘killing a minute ...”

“... on the backside – and Eva and Maria did not make a sound.’ Or a wife is being punished, it may be: ‘As they descended the first flight of stairs, they heard a sharp sound that, as Mary said later, could as easily have been an object dropped as a face slapped.’ Such negations are alive, everywhere and diversely. ‘For reasons they could no longer ...”

“... file, and some forty thousand of them died. Their sufferings were not mythical: nonetheless, one may question the way their particular sacrifice came to dominate the nation’s collective memory of the war (the memories of France and Germany were quite differently constituted). Still very much an insular nation, Britain could not easily comprehend the extent ...”

“... back to the essay on genres, which in turn sends us out to other poems in the anthology ... There may be other collections of poetry conceived in this way, but I have not come across them; certainly this is a model it would repay any anthologist to study. The embedding of the poetry in its historical and literary context is particularly valuable here, for the ...”

“... as the novel brings us into contact with the pressures of a particular predicament, moreover, we may feel ourselves liberated from the generalising entrapments of ‘freedom’ into a consciousness of urgent special dilemmas from which catchwords can bring no real release. The freedom of the imagination is not necessarily greatest in imagining freedom: or ...”

“... Professor Gilbert conjectures that this loss, and a similar and later loss to which we shall come, may be attributable to ‘the confusion of moving’ when John changed schools. It is much more probable that the relevant letters have been suppressed or destroyed because covering periods of difficulty in the relations between father and son which Mrs Kipling ...”

“... admit is that this success was built on Nehru’s internal contradictions. However European they may look to many, his cultural roots, family life and early conditioning, even the charming ambivalence and uncertainties of his political style, were all identifiably Indian and Brahminic. He might have seemed terribly modern or cosmopolitan to his admirers in ...”

“... national resources? Rodger’s answer, repeated many times, is ‘administration’. This may or may not cut much ice in the world of British universities, where the word ‘administration’ is normally surrounded not by scare-quotes but by an atmosphere of holy awe (though also, in secure surroundings, by ribald ...”

“... of the Front National is the most obvious political consequence of this social dislocation. It may at times be able to ‘clean up’ its message, especially when offering its support to the mainstream Right, but the FN remains a racist party, its intellectual leadership now provided by Bruno Megret, the intelligent and articulate potential successor to ...”