“... over his life and over his conduct as a leader of the Revolution, and what is soon evident about David Lawday’s spirited and highly readable biography is that he stands Danton in a flattering light and pays insufficient attention to movements in the shadows. ‘The Gentle Giant of Terror’, the subtitle calls him: which suggests, along with revolutionary ...”

“... of sin. Is this ‘artful whiteface mockery of pious racists’? In his new biography of Wheatley, David Waldstreicher encourages us to think so, and to read the lines in a ‘mocking or satirical instead of a beseeching voice’, so that we can hear Wheatley ‘become the organic intellectual of the enslaved’.The poem shows Wheatley working within narrow ...”

“... of freeing the hostages and punishing their captors only by sacking the place where they had been held. The ‘higher principles of humanity’ he sought to uphold were not what we would now call the higher principles of humanitarianism. Rather, they were the principles of biblical justice, the idea that wrongdoers would be pursued, no matter how far ...”

“... that one way to tackle the climate emergency was to have fewer children. That view is still widely held, especially among well-meaning progressives. Big families look greedy and selfish. Small families look sustainable. And maybe no children is best of all. Don’t reproduce and don’t eat meat were twin mantras for anyone who wanted to reduce their carbon ...”

“... to a movement sorely lacking in both. With his mid-Atlantic drawl and slaloming locutions, he held out the suggestion that being a conservative was a daring and possibly even romantic position in American political life. On television and in his syndicated newspaper column, he fired back at the liberal mandarins, in between Côte-Rôtie-fuelled lunches ...”

“... some form of independence: Sinn Fein won 73 of 105 seats in the General Election of 1918, the last held over the island of Ireland. The prospects for Unionism did not look good. However, by the end of the War of Independence three years later, Carson and Craig had succeeded in keeping six of the nine counties of Ulster out of the new Irish Free State. They did ...”

“... was L’Étoile rose, published in 1978, polemical, didactic and occasionally soupy. The narrator, David, welcomes the arrival of the word ‘gay’ in France from America, comparing it to the dove returning to Noah’s Ark with its message of hope, though he admits it hasn’t quite taken to its new habitat. In the new memoir as well as in L’Étoile rose ...”

“... to produce a tiny tour de force by using three successive auditory analogies then he has held out against it, though the reading brain is likely to supply the sliding scrape of loaded hangers, the jangle of empty ones – the lightness of ‘flick’ suggests wire hangers, whatever Joan Crawford would have had to say about that. (This is not a dressy ...”

“... by a kind of anti-intellectual wisdom, schooled in that harsh world Samuel Johnson endlessly held up to the face of the bon ton: ‘Slow rises worth, by poverty depressed.’ Porter’s 18th century forms a counter-world to conventional evocations of that age. The expression ‘Georgian’ is meant to convey an 18th century with all the sleaze taken ...”

“... good: the best that could be hoped for was that it would do no harm. The Education Act of 1902 held the field until 1944 and was Balfour’s major legislative achievement. Yet he did not much believe in education, at least for the poorer classes. His interest in the Education Bill was, as Mr Mackay points out, primarily partisan. He acted to help his ...”

“... with the press, while Harold Wilson could never wholly hide the peculiar fascination which it held for him. His relations with the Lobby ranged from love affair to stormy divorce. James Callaghan lacked Wilson’s flair as a political news editor but took a self-conscious pride in his acquired mastery of the trade’s little tricks. ‘You know the ...”

“... long evangelist’s beard ‘so he wold loke like a catholike’ even if he wasn’t one, and had held his hand in a candle flame to give him a foretaste of what was in store for him if he failed to recant. Many of the victims had the opportunity to go into hiding or, if they had the connections, to flee abroad. Rowland Taylor was a friend of Cranmer and was ...”

“... defend their communities turned into licensed bandits and racketeers when they took power in rebel-held enclaves. It wasn’t that reporters were factually incorrect in their descriptions of what they had seen. But the very term ‘war reporter’, though not often used by journalists themselves, helps explain what went wrong. Leaving aside its macho ...”

“... to the rubbish bin – and so it was a great deal easier, after the failure of the Camp David summit last July, to claim, as Clinton and Barak have done, that the Palestinians were to blame for the impasse, rather than the Israelis, whose position remains that the 1967 territories are not to be returned. The US press has referred again and again to ...”

“... that proliferate around Gödel’s theorem and its consequences. Incompleteness has been held to show, for example, that there cannot be a Theory of Everything, the so-called holy grail of modern physics. Some philosophers and mathematicians say it proves that minds can’t be modelled by machines, while others argue that they can be modelled but ...”