“... Nelson Mandela was instrumental to the political bargain that proposed forgiveness in the hope of a better future. Whatever we think of South Africa now, we still contemplate with horror the abyss into which it was widely expected to plunge twenty years ago. How far have things really moved on? Will the historic compromise hold or has the country been ...”

“... of me to anticipate Fenton’s approach to Anthony Julius’s compelling study, but I would hope that he will not see fit to mount another repudiation of this brilliant, passionately concentrated ‘adversarial reading’ of Eliot’s work. I say ‘another repudiation’ advisedly, because Julius’s book was rejected by Oxford University Press on the ...”

“... after many years of not seeing him, catches sight of Bagshaw on a railway platform, ‘suggested hope to avoid recognition, while a not absolutely respectable undertaking was accomplished.’ There are two stories about how he came by his nickname. In one, Bagshaw is drunk, and, seeking to verify a quotation from Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, pulls over a ...”

“... affection’ for the Bourbon monarchy: he later confessed to weeping at the sight of Charles X being forced out of Versailles. But professional ambition led him to swear an oath of allegiance to the new constitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe d’Orléans. When asked to choose a side, Tocqueville, not for the last time, preferred to maintain an ...”

“... after students and donors complained about his tweets criticising Israel. The billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch have donated huge sums to advance their project of converting university students to free-market fundamentalism and then placing them in positions of political power. At the College of Charleston in South Carolina, Koch money was donated on ...”

“... The touchiness of other people disturbed Heaney and drove him to fits of remorse. ‘I hope a letter is not too melodramatic,’ he writes to Michael and Edna Longley, after a perceived early failure to be an advocate for poetry in the North: ‘It is not so much in the hope of redressing any hurt as to allay my ...”

“... Grub Street Cleopatra on her barge. As a junior member of the Cabinet with intellectual leanings, Charles Masterman had been charged with doing something that would produce effective propaganda for the Allied cause, especially in the neutral United States. He responded by convening in Whitehall a gathering of ‘eminent authors’, attended by William ...”

“... always ironised. We are always left out, especially when we seem to be included. ‘There is hope,’ Kafka wrote, ‘but not for us.’ Since the essential thing is there but not for us it is in a sense not really there – much as an Olympic victory isn’t there for a swimmer, because once the swimmer couldn’t swim and therefore can’t have won at ...”

“... to listen, to join in the debates in this suddenly transformed Scotland, where a turbid flood of hope and doubt, of new-found collective confidence and old prejudices, was running towards September. In Caithness, we heard the news that fire had destroyed Glasgow School of Art and the grove-like library which was ...”

“... Shock and horror swept through Allied and neutral nations alike. In New York City, the composer Charles Ives observed that passengers waiting for the ‘El’ train spontaneously began to sing the Gospel song ‘In the Sweet By and By’, whose refrain promised that the drowned would one day be saved: In the sweet by and by We shall meet on that beautiful ...”

“... in a dirt and paint-encrusted green baize coat with a tired old wig. But a bequest was the best hope for the two women, whose other male relatives had proven unreliable. Margaret’s brother, John, apprenticed to a Dublin lawyer, had already squandered the family property. Du Preez and Dronfield interpret the motivation behind Bulkley’s decision to take ...”

“... but talk on these lines can easily grow unreal and rather clammy. What most people actually hope for is that Biden will somehow talk down the violent extremes that seem on the verge of an open clash. Popular worries about the election led to a drastic spike in gun purchases. ‘The country,’ Biden said in a campaign speech in Gettysburg, ‘is in a ...”

“... of evidence suggests a strong presumption of Berlioz’s mendacity. Boschot was friendly with Charles Malherbe, chief editor of the (nearly) Complete Edition of Berlioz’s music published by Breitkopf and Härtel (1900-1910), which, revealing a similar distrust of what the composer wrote, standardised instrumentation, dynamics and phrasing according to ...”

“... that in certain quarters lasted until the Blitz. Fifty years later it was revived by Prince Charles in his 1987 ‘Luftwaffe’ speech at Mansion House. Frank Lloyd Wright was a 19th-century man, with an uncomplicated belief in progress. He was born before Imperial Germany existed, at a time when the Emperor Napoleon III was securely on the throne of ...”

“... afflictions: her brother’s epilepsy, the death by drowning of a sister, like Browning’s Evelyn Hope ‘sixteen years old when she died’. Life and literature became inextricably tangled for the young girl in a quiet province. Frame is skilled at describing the almost tactile presence of words for the child and adolescent: the physical shock when she ...”