“... prised them, it sets out to judge the degree to which the drama was or was not complicit with the powers of the state that seem to sustain it. Second, by inserting the ‘afterlives’ of the plays into subsequent history and by historicising salient features of ‘literature’ and ‘criticism’, it offers to assess their use as instruments of present ...”

“... she quoted an exchange between Joan of Arc and her interrogators about her vision of the archangel Michael: ‘How did you know that it was St Michael?’ ‘By the way he spoke and his language of angels.’ ‘How did you know it was the language of angels?’ ‘I soon believed it was. I wanted to believe that it ...”

“... US Defense Shield, Armageddon has retreated further. In The Globalisation of World Politics (2001) Michael Cox pointed out that today ‘nuclear war is far less likely to happen,’ even though there has been an increase in the number of wars. Later in the same volume Andrew Linklater maintained that ‘there is no doubt that globalisation and fragmentation ...”

“... McCluskie remains in prison. It is customary to think of long sentences and long stretches as Michael Howard’s contribution to British penal policy, but he is merely the latest in a long, if occasionally interrupted, line of social conservatives with a particular interest in correction. When, in October 1993, he announced to the Conservative Party ...”

“... value of dislocation. As he says in ‘Place and Displacement’ (1984), the work of Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon and Heaney himself resembles that of the young Wordsworth – loyal to Revolutionary France but attached to England – in that political and cultural dislocation in Ulster makes their experience of belonging plural. It would be ...”

“... in Biography of Broken Fortunes: Wilky and Bob, Brothers of William, Henry and Alice James (1986); Michael Anesko in ‘Friction with the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (1986); Rayburn Moore in Selected Letters of Henry James to Edmund Gosse (1988); and Lyall Powers in Henry James and Edith ...”

“... might well have led to pressure, not least from conservative Tories, to consolidate local powers. So the Government improvised. Block grants, expenditure targets, penalties, more severe penalties, rate-capping and ‘incentives’ were introduced to get spending down. None of these had much effect. A Green Paper in 1986 conceded an at best ‘modest ...”

“... Milton Keynes is a direct descendant of Bloomsbury seems about as plausible as trying to show that Michael Foot speaks with the authentic voice of the Levellers. More fundamentally, the central argument of this book, that London’s homely architecture is the product and expression of Londoners’ homely virtues, is chronologically unsound. Most of the ...”

“... capable of surprisingness, there is always more to say. In that sense he is Shakespearean: his powers give power to others. Though the canon is already formidable, these new studies all add to it in different ways and suggest something new going on. For newness, of a unique kind, is perpetually immanent in Dostoevsky, always on the verge of breaking ...”

“... of post-Reform Bill politics is the quite unexpected emergence of a kind of radical Tory populism. Michael Foot is reported as saying of this welcome rediscovery: ‘To read the book is to be convinced as well as enraptured.’ It would be interesting to know what his present opponents might make of it. One way of writing a ‘political novel’ is to proceed ...”

“... political career. This has all the fascination of political biography for those of us who, in Michael Oakeshott’s feline phrase, ‘cannot live without the illusion of affairs’ – even if our experience must perforce be vicarious as well as illusory. No reader of such pages in the early months of 1986 will be surprised to find that unresolved ...”

“... New Class in 1956. The fullest account of the phenomenon in the Soviet Union is contained in Michael Voslensky’s Nomenklatura (1984). This shows how the privileged – by rank and, increasingly, by birth – are sealed off from the many intractable problems of everyday Soviet life, which, Stephen Cohen maintains in his interesting volume of essays, put ...”

“... his career was a slippery mixture of principled conviction and clever accommodation to the ruling powers. There is a curious moment in his preface where he goes out of his way to assert that Virgil was ‘still of republican principles in his heart’. He then contrives to make Augustus sound like a constitutional monarch and so edges a step closer to the new ...”

“... relating to that change is wrongly described by Ashton as a dispute within the Livery over the powers exercised by the Court of Assistants. In fact, the Livery was not divided and the dispute was not about the Court of Assistants. The conflict concerned the struggle of the ‘young men’ outside the Livery for constitutional and financial benefits, and ...”

“... Divis, or the Black Mountain, as it’s called. We stare out at the mountain and drink glasses of Powers. Now and then there’s a silence, pause, a moment of contemplation, a gap. It’s like being inside a double bowl – the glass dome, then the city ringed by hills. A line of Lowell’s – ‘this sweet volcanic cone’ – comes to mind, except it’s ...”