“... in Light in August. But the English novel in the 20th century, I concede, is something. It has the power to offend; it has the courage of its class convictions. There is no visual art in the same period of which this can be said. Sculpture in England is a special case. I shall put it aside, essentially, till I come to ...”

“... enabled him to give you any reason at all.’ There were a few clever commanders, such as Henry Brackenbury, who found himself in charge of the River Column in February 1885 when General Earle was shot through the head, but the soldiers distrusted him as ‘bureaucratic’ and ‘scholastic’. The men had ample opportunity for combat at its most ...”

“... been to be safely married off. But that she intended otherwise is implied by what she wrote to Henry VIII in presenting him with her New Year’s gift for 1546. As his daughter, she would be ‘not only the imitator of his virtues but also heir to them’. Mind, and character, are much in evidence in these two books: a substantial, scholarly, but ...”

“... character, and imparted a strong dose of New World optimism to his surviving children. Of these, Henry Leigh Hunt was the youngest son, a shy, bookish child who got a rigorous, one might almost say republican, education at Christ’s Hospital in the City of London, where he was a friend of Thomas Barnes, a future editor of the Times, and a younger ...”

“... a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organised power . . . After the late failure of radical hopes.’ And Saturday turns out to be a soliloquising novel of urban experience in a similar tradition, mostly written, like Herzog, in free indirect style – though McEwan makes less use than Bellow of interior ...”

“... thesis about the way Britain worked at that time and, no doubt, still works today. They describe a power structure of which the elected government is only a temporary part. The other roles belong to the ‘permanent government’, a term coined by Anthony Verrier to cover the Cabinet Office, the upper echelons of the Home Office, Foreign Office and Ministry of ...”

“... public figure in the Western world, because, among all the presidents and premiers who exercise power from Washington to the borders of the old Russian Empire, he seems to be the only figure guided by a sense of history. The Euro-ideals of Kohl, Mitterrand, Major and the rest are based on the presumption that it is more polite to behave as if the past had ...”

“... part of EU law concerns matters that have been devolved, and those nations will be suspicious of a power grab if all EU law is repatriated to Whitehall. Transferring existing EU law into domestic law is essential if there are not to be huge gaps in UK law after Brexit. The problem is the magnitude of the task. It is hard to give exact estimates, but a huge ...”

“... of the time – all with a view to making us ‘rethink our own inadequate categories of gender, power and sexuality’. His ultimate purpose, like that of the authors whose books he has commissioned, is, then, to make us better people, straighten us out on certain matters which we habitually get seriously wrong. The method chosen to advance this good cause ...”

“... ambiguity, because it confounds moral life with doctrine or dogma. We need only the reminder of Henry James, who, while cautioning against any ‘moral restrictions set upon the field of consciousness’, affirmed the moral character of art: ‘to count out the moral element in one’s appreciation of an artistic total is exactly as sane as it would be (if ...”

“... do hate to give up their claims, however. Well into the middle of the 13th century, John’s son Henry III was still insisting that he was the rightful duke of Normandy. And in a longer perspective, Henry’s reign, and those of his son and grandson, the first two Edwards, represent a mere century’s intermission during ...”

“... looking forward to this: historians wrestling in mud is a common spectacle that never loses its power to give pleasure – like dissent between taxi-drivers. They were disappointed. Taylor stayed out of the mud. More accurately, he wrote in these pages that he found the whole affair boring – ‘cold mutton’, as he said about the Anthony Blunt ...”

“... country back from post-Watergate malaise and disillusionment, but liberals would surely be back in power soon. In his new book, however, Reeves acknowledges that the Reagan era changed American political life seemingly for ever, by exalting free enterprise and the market and putting government permanently on the defensive. ‘Amazing things, good and ...”

“... appear under the authorial name. From another point of view, however, it testifies to Ellison’s power. For the essays, interviews and memoirs he published when he was failing to complete his second novel allow the reader to hope that the imagination he or she is now imposing on the material known as Juneteenth owes everything to the control of the ...”

“... of a properly human society, a civil order. But it is only occasionally – in the mob scenes of Henry VI Part 2, Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, for example, or in the tavern scenes of both parts of Henry IV and of Henry V – that the gritty realities of the London streets are brought ...”