“... Goethe, Stendhal and Tolstoy; but most of these authors were foreigners, and though other nations may speak of a literary science, the English prefer to define the timeless essence of the literary in terms that have been current only for about two hundred years in a smallish corner of the globe. The first theorist of academic English in Britain, Richards saw ...”

“... familiar to students of Plato and of Freud – that the obstacles to your capacity to act freely may be internal rather than external, and that you will need to free yourself from these psychological constraints if you are to behave autonomously. But this, too, fails to capture a separate concept of positive liberty. For while the notion of an internal ...”

“... of the English writers, and what are the deficiencies of the late attempts, which another editor may hope to supply.’ If even the belligerent Johnson felt he had to justify producing a new complete Shakespeare in 1756 – an edition aiming to supersede only two or three rivals, which by the time of its appearance would be at least twenty years old – how ...”

“... Rideh has no idea what interventions his advocate made in the proceedings). There may not have been any witnesses who weren’t members of the security services. It is possible, therefore, that all the evidence heard by the SIAC was hearsay. It is difficult to have much faith in the secret evidence, when one considers the quality of that given ...”

“... Persons and Parts, without changing their Minds or Affection.’ This contemporary Jesuit critique may have been a counsel of perfection, but Parsons had undoubtedly put his finger on a real weakness in the Marian settlement. Pole himself lamented the necessity of employing the Henrician episcopate and parish clergy to undo the schism they had helped ...”

“... decades that took a retrospective grip on the popular imagination were the 1890s and the 1920s. It may not be a coincidence that both have been characterised as fun-loving eras that chucked out staid manners and stale customs, whose social revolutionaries were libertines (Mae West) and gangsters (James Cagney). Perhaps more than any other agency, it was ...”

“... here: you can’t simply say that inequality means we are all suffering together. Instead, it may mean that the poor are doing so badly that the rich aren’t interested in looking at the wider picture. They are focused on making sure they don’t wind up poor. This is why the difference between ‘almost everyone’ and ‘everyone on average’ matters ...”

“... a very nice place you can stay.’ She caught herself and smiled at this weak stab at PR. Merkel may be the only remaining major politician in the West with a capacity for irony: she often seems to be suppressing an inward smile. The audience appeared eager that she leave the stage so they could hear from the gold-medal kayaker. Only when Merkel walked ...”

“... as-told-to by a certain ‘Pauline’, written up in the third person by ‘Alice Michel’, who may have been the novelist ‘Rachilde’ (co-editor and co-founder of Le Mercure), it is not so much kiss-and-tell as pose-and-tell. And it is a curious text to evaluate, the more so when rendered into American English, with Degas as a ‘cranky and demanding ...”

“... on coded language that everyone understands but which can be plausibly denied. Cruz and Hatch may have been distressed by Trump’s response to Charlottesville, but neither of them objects to his policies on race, which amount to the most aggressive assault on civil rights since the Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965. His attorney general, Jeff ...”

“... play, The Sad Shepherd, for her monograph on Shakespeare’s great rival. Given this history, it may seem surprising that The Shakespearean Forest is not a longer book, but Barton became almost blind as a result of macular degeneration and was forced to abandon her work. When she died in 2013 it remained incomplete and its publication has been a labour of ...”

“... but hardly friends, partly because Marianne is used to abrasive dealings with the world, and may actively prefer them that way. Rejected by her mother and brother (her father is dead), she can hardly be said to have such a thing as a self-image. She sees her reflection in the mirror in virtually non-human terms: ‘It’s a face like a piece of ...”

“... the vast majority of genetic variation is found within so-called races, not between them. You may well have more in common genetically with someone of a different skin colour than with someone of the same skin colour. But culture came first in thinking about race, and it comes first today. The idea of ‘whiteness’ continues to be used to make powerful ...”

“... you’ll feel at home and not as if you’re playing spy,’ he told Sorge.Sorge went to Berlin in May 1933 and spent the next three months fulfilling the tasks set for him. He joined the Nazi Party, obtained a German passport – his profession declared as ‘journalist’ – and was accredited as the Tokyo correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung. He made a ...”

“... domestic democratic politics. That is the main concern of Robert Crowcroft’s new book, but there may also be broader lessons, of relevance to Britain’s present predicament. A core assumption of those who write about the ‘appeasement’ crisis has always been that it does indeed hold broader lessons. Unfortunately, they disagree profoundly about what ...”