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“... the 1980s by a touch of incestuous and homo-erotic feeling. Writing in the New Republic in 1979, Richard Hall faulted the five-volume biography for manifesting ‘a peculiar timidity at the centre of the work’. What was missing from Edel’s account, according to Hall, was not so much James’s ‘homo-erotic bent’ – Edel had, after all, speculated in ...”

“... experience is China, which he never visited as prime minister, but where for many years the powers-that-be seem to have imagined that he remained the paramount leader of Britain. He records no fewer than 22 visits there, parlaying with Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping. As far as we know, these visits achieved absolutely nothing, except the loan of some ...”

“... made inexorable forever.’ Concessions would be granted for limited opportunity as for limited powers. Our loving father knows ‘how far the means of grace have been afforded’ a man. He willingly admits ‘every real extenuation of our failings and transgressions’. This position, which fairly well completes Johnson’s moral scaffolding, meets the ...”

“... as implied, for example, in the Tebbit Bill: it is not that abroad the legal or economic powers of unions are more restricted, it is that ‘unlike the British they do not wish to use them in ways damaging to the nation in general and their members in particular.’ Furthermore, the unions are not really to blame for these attitudes. They have ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... things; who cannot be well at ease, while he sees evil hovering near him like a spectre; whose powers of action have been eaten up by thought, he to whom the universe seems infinite, and himself nothing; and who goes to a play as his best resource to shove off, to a second remove, the evils of life by a mock representation of them – this is the true ...”

“... Tim, personally, and if you’re an American, you could hack it with no loss of status: Tim Powers, the Steampunk, or Tim O’Brien with a safely macho Vietnam novel, If I Die in a Combat Zone. There were even saddlebums with clean fingernails called Tim. Tim Holt, for example, went unwashed and unshaved through the badlands in films like The Treasure ...”

“... in world politics. Its fate was barely discussed at the wartime conferences of the Allied powers. Against considerable odds, and with little outside help, the partisans and communists led by Enver Hoxha and Mehmet Shehu forced the German army from their country in 1944, and afterwards held off a series of US and British operations to subvert the new ...”

“... former Communists (and/or sympathisers) that included Gide, Silone and Koestler; it was edited by Richard Crossman and the Congress distributed it. Carefully negotiating my way through a maze of booksellers’ wares laid out on the pavement alongside Ezbekieh Gardens in Cairo in late 1957, I was brought up short by a large pile of TGTFs stacked in front of ...”

“... English plans for a treaty of peace and collective security to be signed by all Europe’s major powers. At its heart was a new Anglo-French alliance of ‘perpetual friendship’ in which Henry’s daughter Mary was betrothed to the French dauphin. The two kings, the treaty stipulated, were to meet in person as ‘brothers in arms’. Wolsey had ...”

“... downright good a story … Too oily.’ ‘I was only thinking last night,’ she wrote in 1921 to Richard Murry, ‘people have hardly begun to write yet – now I mean prose … Aren’t they still cutting up sections rather than tackling the whole of a mind? … With all that one knows how much does one not know? … The unknown is far, far greater than the ...”

“... an early hint of an important component of religious thought: immanence. Gods and supernatural powers can be inside statues, mountains, lakes, seas, nature itself, and of course people.’ We also have here – though the fact does not concern Lewis-Williams – our earliest evidence of systematic line-drawing. The ends of the blocks were flattened to make ...”

“... they spoke of corporations and banks and ‘championed the rights of management and the productive powers of the free enterprise “system”.’ The idea of the market that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s – ‘self-equilibrating, instantaneous in its sensitivities and global in its reach, gathering the wants of myriad individuals into its system of price ...”

“... of those accused of grave crimes and to wish to see them punished, it does not enhance one’s powers of observation. All court systems that function well do so because they are well supervised: by governments, parliaments and, most important, by a vigorous press. The international courts established by the UN, and the permanent International Criminal ...”

“... different piece on the piano in case his memory attracted attention. Even more impressive were his powers of improvisation. Though he thought extemporising in public an ‘absurdity’, it was his stock-in-trade. In private, on one of his many visits to London, he wowed a nine-year-old pianist with 20 spontaneous variations on ‘Bluebells of ...”