“... to partial failure at best, is as familiar a note in American social thinking as is boosterism. Stephen Holmes made a shrewd, unkind, point about the characteristic argumentative style of The True and Only Heaven. Lasch depicts liberalism as a creed that fails to satisfy the moral passions of its opponents, and says that if it has failed to satisfy many of ...”

“... to have affected the outcome of the debate (let alone the outcome of the election) is strikingly small. Although debates have been decided by gaffes and (less often) by winning bon mots, they are as likely to be won in the moments between the contestants’ speeches as by the speeches themselves. In the first and most recent series of debates (Kennedy/Nixon ...”

“... there.’I had left Hargeisa, Somaliland’s nominal capital, early that morning in a small convoy of 4x4s belonging to Save the Children, the charity leading the drought response here. We drove east for hours through the open plains. Termite mounds rose like fingers from the earth, some of them as tall as the thorn trees that were among the only ...”

“... embraced in non-Christian examples: illusion is the domain of spirits. Among Christians (as Stephen Greenblatt has observed) these qualities are more problematic. Mimetic art – especially theatre – has troubled many Western thinkers, Christian or otherwise. Christianity is founded on a series of truth claims – the gospel, the saving act, the ...”

“... were always lively; and we should be grateful that this one persisted long enough to yield that small masterpiece, Eminent Victorians. Even those who find much to admire in his parents’ generation can still relish his devastating satire of the all-too-worldly Cardinal Manning or his shrewd portrait of the demons that drove the supposedly saintly Florence ...”

“... a family that somewhere along the way I have somehow got separated from’, a ‘land of small pleasures, quietly savoured – card schools (men and women) on Christmas night, football (men and boys) on Boxing Day, a trip to the local for a game of darts and a couple of pints (men only) when we had “guests”’. Or as Harry puts it, ‘card ...”

“... I mention these examples from Kraus’s own linguistic and historical world – Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, in their book Wittgenstein’s Vienna, suggest that Kraus’s work is the other, ‘unwritten’ half of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus – in order to suggest both that there may be times and places where aphorisms flourish especially and that there ...”

“... cohort of young historians of the Soviet Union trained at Columbia in the 1990s who, influenced by Stephen Kotkin, first brought Foucault to Soviet history. Psychologists, specialists in forensic medicine and statisticians – all those in Russia who studied the phenomenon of suicide in the first decade of the 20th century – complained of the lack of state ...”

“... of great interest to navigators. The result was a map that preserved angles and the shapes of small objects everywhere on the map, but greatly distorted scale overall. Hence Antarctica looms large on a Mercator projection, dwarfing Europe and Asia combined, even though in actuality, Europe and Asia together cover nearly four times the area of ...”

“... again was short on detail: most of the book, Goldman admits, is ‘an angry attack on a relatively small and privileged elite’. Moral judgment, not programmatic vision, predominates.Compare this with other economic proposals of the time: with the Liberal Industrial Inquiry of 1928 or the brilliant socialist proposal put forward by the ILP in 1926 under the ...”

“... MacNeice and John Betjeman. Among his friends at Oxford were Isaiah Berlin, Maurice Bowra and Stephen Spender, with whom he coedited the magazine Oxford Poetry in 1930. In his excellent introduction to this definitive Complete Poetry, Peter Robinson characterises Spencer as an unconfident poet who, when his luck was in, wrote poems that were ‘profoundly ...”

“... Foxe said he had never read anything ‘less pleasant, more choppy or more rebarbative’ than Stephen Gardiner’s prose (‘he spirals off so wildly that he needs a Sibyl rather than a translator’); Balthasar Moretus of the Plantin company complained that one author’s ‘writing, which is not so much inelegant as simply full of mistakes, terrifies ...”

“... just you try winking across the footlights when playing Mouth in Not I, with only a small area of your face left visible. He went to great lengths to strip the humanity from the speaker in that play, who possesses nothing but the words she disowns (by making out she’s recounting someone else’s experience), and then reconstituted it in the ...”

“... anxiety in many battles over literary estates is familial: whether patrimony, as in the case of Stephen Joyce, who terrorised scholars with his capricious restrictions on quotation from his grandfather’s published work until it came out of copyright last year; or the lateral bonds of marriage, which produce similar dramas of insecurity. (Valerie Eliot ...”

“... which he wrote. Van Es’s book is a more conventionally academic study than Shapiro’s, or than Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World (2004), less sprightly in its prose and weighed down with scholarly apparatus. Yet, though they are barely cited, Shakespeare in Company is very much an extension of Greenblatt’s and Shapiro’s work, whose mode of ...”