“... political power, and is the more glaring when the form that power takes is force majeure. Contra Thomas Nagel and other US liberals, leaders who can segue fluently from blowjob to prayer-breakfast should give us pause for thought. The gospelling blag takes a darker turn in ‘the new military humanism’ or, in other words, killing people as an act of ...”

“... been made for his work. Fante has been compared to Dostoevsky, Knut Hamsun, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Thomas Wolfe, Steinbeck, James Farrell, William Saroyan and Nathanael West. In 1977, a Washington Post reviewer compared The Brotherhood of the Grape to The Brothers Karamazov and King Lear. Hyperbole aside, both Fante’s early novels are excellent ...”

“... Adams hops back and forth, his diction slicing the King’s English into definitive new states. Thomas Jefferson, dressed in mauve, so sexual he can barely speak coherently, lounges on the window seat in a soft-focus rapist’s reverie, dreaming of not freeing his slaves after he dies. His wife sings a nymphomaniacal song about him ‘fiddling’, which is ...”

“... in the idea of life as a form of play and the writer as a kind of actor. At Cambridge, he and Edward Upward invented personae for themselves to inhabit, as well as a place, Mortmere, a sort of nursery habitation full of gothic fantasy, surreal antics and sexual innuendo. ‘Isherwood always found or invented someone or something to scrutinise and question ...”

“... like Joseph Fouché and the Abbé Grégoire, the rather bland remark of the English historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, that ‘the richest vineyards and the sweetest flowers always grow on the soil which has been fertilised by the fiery deluge of a volcano’, became a rallying cry for the purgative destruction that they believed necessary to make a ...”

“... a model – youth, maturity, ageing. In the early 19th century the English architectural antiquary Thomas Rickman looked at the changing styles of medieval Gothic windows and came up with the terms ‘Early English’, ‘Decorated’ and ‘Perpendicular’: church-crawlers still use that shorthand, not thinking much about the implied pessimism. An early ...”

“... For​ the late French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Thomas Robert Malthus was an indispensable guide to the agrarian past. Le Roy Ladurie applied Malthus’s argument that population grows faster than subsistence to the archives of Languedoc, where, in the empirical detail of parish registers, cadastral surveys, tax rolls and price series, he perceived ‘the immense respiration of a social structure’ over the course of three centuries ...”

“... sterling fell so far that it couldn’t be given away on the black market.The queue outside the Thomas Cook office curled around several blocks – women, mostly, desperately trying to secure passage in one of the very few ships leaving from Port Said. Micheline got berths on the troopship Queen Elizabeth. On 18 July, she left with her daughters from ...”

“... it is not) an official biography, he has evidently depended on or even worked fairly closely with Edward Mendelson, perhaps Auden’s ‘scholar-in-chief’, his literary executor and the editor who worked directly according to his wishes. And yet legends afflict Mendelson’s work as well. After his edition of the Collected Poems, which retains Auden’s own ...”

“... I’ve sat on the lawn reading the Block Prince’s Register and other sources for the reign of Edward III. On Tuesday I took a complete holiday. Taking sandwiches I left college at 8.40 a.m., called for Rowse at All Souls, and walked through the early morning sunshine to the station. There we took the train to South Leigh. It was ten by the time we arrived ...”

“... it was as though my schoolfellows and I had stumbled into the pages of ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’, ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’ or another of the horrid inventions in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. Led past stacks of disintegrating coffins, from which skulls and yellowing bones spilled across the dusty floor, we were introduced to the crypt’s ...”

“... teaching officers were without a college fellowship. So the former secretary of the Cabinet, Edward Bridges, was invited to examine what could be done. True to form, the colleges turned down his main, and the university his secondary, recommendation. Commensality means a lot to Brooke. Cambridge should be a community of scholars not a nine-to-five ...”

“... changing paradigms. In the latter instance, the debate has been carried on within the Institute by Thomas Kuhn, who first described scientific revolutions in terms of ‘paradigm shifts’, and Dudley Shapere, who has tried to rescue the notion of objective truth, never complete but seen more and more correctly with the passing of time, from the limbo of ...”

“... more radically terrifying precedents for the development of the infant American Republic, and Edward Genêt, France’s first minister to the United States, began to enlist Americans in the work of spreading revolution in Europe, American thinkers and writers came to react against the world they themselves had turned upside down. They did this, according ...”

“... shows one sequel at the top of the list (the further adventures of Hannibal the Cannibal in Thomas Harris’s continuation of The Silence of the Lambs – a ‘second helping’, quipped one reviewer archly) and at least three more sequels and a prequel (predictably, the book version of Star Wars, Episode I) among the contenders. One of the sequels is a ...”