“... could dismiss the police as their social inferiors. Nor did the Indians have to worry about pass laws or curfews or learning English or the thousand and one other handicaps that beset Africans. You would have needed to reverse the law of gravity for them not to have dominated the ANC. I never knew a Communist who didn’t believe that, though of course we ...”

“... are not variable confessions but different worlds, and different instruments of understanding. David Kepesh in The Dying Animal offers a strong sidelight on Roth in The Plot against America, a comic view of liberty and nation which darkens and widens in the new novel. Kepesh, divorced and determined never to make the mistake of marriage again, takes true ...”

“... as 1935 there was hope that the Jewish body – now clearly labelled as Jewish by the Nuremberg Laws – might still be transcended, that my father’s optimism was not entirely phantasmal. Form U146 – dated 19 September 1935 – admits him to stand before the examining body for medicine at the University of Hamburg and present his credentials. The second ...”

“... imposing so-called civilisation on others. ‘I used to think that the people who created these laws that effectively suspended the rule of law were moral barbarians. Now I know they were just pioneers, ahead of their time.’ There is plenty more of this quietly savage tone in Diary of a Bad Year, and lots about the facility at Guantánamo Bay and ...”

“... which broadly complements the illuminating recent sketches of Henrician politics by the historian David Starkey. Thomas Starkey’s proposals are rooted in the Lancastrian conciliarism of the Middle Ages, when the peerage had kept the crown in check. The nostalgic or reactionary component of the Dialogue is repeatedly evident. We see it in Starkey’s ...”

“... to be said for taking the dim view, including the fact that the British kept the Fascist racial laws, even after they were scrapped in Italy. The implacably pro-Ethiopian Sylvia Pankhurst was rightly horrified by the British decision to seize and dismantle valuable quantities of plant and ship them out of the territory. Eritrea also doubled for the British ...”

“... first dawning sense of the historicity of society so rudely awakened by the French Revolution. David Wittenberg does much better than this, but his remarkable hypothesis is only one of the conceptual breakthroughs in this stimulating contribution to literary theory. I will dwell mainly on the three that interest me the most: the relationship of SF to ...”

“... Slessor’s good works on the Upper Niger still earn her an image on Scottish banknotes, while David Livingstone became the world’s best-known Scotsman. They did not save many souls. After 50 years’ work in India, the missions could show only 3359 converts. But their influence on empire was deep and paradoxical, at once the advance guard of colonialism ...”

“... Mary de Rachewiltz (Pound’s daughter by the American violinist Olga Rudge), and Joanna and David Moody (who is at work on a multi-volume biography of Pound) have chosen to include every message from the poet to his parents in its entirety, however mundane. I suppose one might pause to note from the above the extent to which Pound was open to sharing ...”

“... controversy by whose lurid light his subsequent work was prejudged and has been judged ever since. David Womersley – now Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford – stands at the head of those scholars who try to situate Gibbon in his 18th-century context, thus raising and trying to answer many questions, of which that just framed is central to the ...”

“... and Astronautics, who has come up with 52, one for each week of the year. Augustine’s Laws uses its axioms to mock bureaucratic routine, state regulation of economic activity, administratively defined corporate policy and spurious expertise. Law Number XXXI: ‘The optimum committee has no members.’ Law Number MLVII: ‘Two-thirds of the ...”

“... weight was crushing even for the very finest of its mandarins. The senior Foreign Office official, David Gore-Booth, agreed that answers ‘should be accurate’ but thought that ‘half a picture can be accurate.’ Similarly, the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robin Butler, thought that it was ‘acceptable in some circumstances for a statement to disclose only part ...”

“... he himself developed in the 1990s, and when we met, he took me back to the repeal of the Corn Laws in the 1840s: a good example, he believes, of trading interests driving down domestic food production. Lang is not opposed to trade; it’s just that on the religion of the markets he is agnostic and feels this is becoming a respectable position: whatever ...”

“... portrait, albeit of a distinctively colonial character and quality. Last year, the art historian David Bindman, who has studied the picture closely for thirty years, proposed that it is in fact a self-portrait, painted by Williams himself.What is the intent of the image and what is created by its beholders? The problem of Francis Williams’s portrait shows ...”

“... life of the criminal was forfeited – ‘sacrificed’ was the 18th-century term – ‘to the laws of his country’, which enshrined the sanctity of property, or of a man’s home, or of paper money or of normative sexuality. These were worth someone dying for and a number of thieves, burglars, forgers, sodomites and rapists were hanged because, it was ...”