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“... Of all Obama’s appointments, the most damaging to his credibility with liberal supporters were Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner, the chief economic adviser and the secretary of the treasury. Geithner has the air of a perpetual young man looking out for the interests of older men: an errand boy. The older men in question are the CEOs of Goldman ...”

“... early in his career, even if the experience he was talking about was often pretty notional. D.H. Lawrence caught the whiff of this when he reviewed Hemingway’s book In Our Time and spoke of a prose in which ‘Nothing matters. Everything happens.’ Better than anything else, the letters show how much was going on in the Hemingway universe in 1917-18, the ...”

“... Pickering has the vision to hire women, but the story isn’t about him. Nor is it about Abbott Lawrence Lowell, the president of Harvard who makes a classically villainous appearance to deny a renowned female astronomer a university appointment she obviously merits, and swear that she will never get a professorship while he’s alive. Pickering and ...”

“... philosophy. To what extent such ideas have ruled one can only surmise, although the evidence in Lawrence Wittner’s American Intervention in Greece, 1943-49 seems to be the extraordinary tip of an even more extraordinary iceberg. The passage is interesting for the attitudes it embodies to the American past (‘long-standing American concepts of fair ...”

“... are beginning to swallow up all the agricultural land between the city centre and the villages John Clare knew. Peterborough has already accepted, at a price, the forcibly migrated rough sleepers of Cambridge. Its reward is public housing gifted by remote Kensington developers.When​ I reached the Thames, coming away from Abbey Wood station, I was ...”

“... he would have been disappointed. There was some half-hearted praise from Movement types, but when John Carey, for example, needed an honourable popular writer to batter the highbrows with in The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), he turned to Arnold Bennett. Morgan’s biography had a memorable centrepiece: a description of the senile Maugham crapping on ...”

“... emerged unscathed (‘all those cheerless craps between 1900 and 1930 – Ginny Woolf and Dai Lawrence and Morgy Forster’). It is perhaps not surprising that the publication of their letters did not exactly enhance the contemporary standing of either author, but, quite apart from the faux-naif priggishness of much of the disapproval, there was a failure ...”

“... the true measure of jihadi fame. Since then, he has been read at West Point, profiled by Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker, heralded by Newsweek as the ‘Francis Fukuyama of al-Qaida’ and by CNN as ‘the most dangerous terrorist you’ve never heard of’. The ‘architect of global jihad’ seems to have been discovered by the umma and the Great ...”

“... many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her’. Lawrence Selden who watches her, is ‘aware that the qualities distinguishing her from the herd of her sex were chiefly external: as though a fine glaze of beauty and fastidiousness had been applied to vulgar clay’. Two years earlier, W.B. Yeats had published ...”

“... and valuable and very funny and entertaining. It’s most like – weirdly enough – D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, another book that gets its energy from poking holes in just the right places to release all that built-up sexual tension. (Carter had a lifelong love-hate relationship with ...”

“... Still, Carr’s Dostoevsky survives in a way that the effusions on the subject of Lawrence, Gide or even Berdyaev do not, and his evocation of the Dostoevskian ‘double’ (Zosima/Ferapont or Ivan/Smerdyakov) has never been bettered. Carr’s other outstanding book of this period is The Romantic Exiles (1933). It is extraordinary that he ...”

“... We learn that Egdon Heath offered him the possibility of ‘unity of place’ and was, ‘as John Bayley astutely suggests, nothing less than “a microcosm of the dark indifferent universe in which human life has to be carried on”.’ It thus ‘becomes the perfect setting for the social, political and intellectual upheavals of the age that the novel ...”

“... on Germany in 1990, Trevor-Roper faced her down and tore her arguments to pieces. The historian John Habakkuk was an editor of Economic History Review in 1952 when Trevor-Roper’s onslaught against R.H. Tawney landed on his desk. He mused: ‘I find it difficult to decide whether T-R is a fundamentally nice person in the grip of a prose style in which it ...”

“... up the steeply banked terraces. But noble as the site appears, it is not entirely benign. The poet John Lucas, in 92 Acharnon Street, reminds us that the old Olympic stadium is where ‘the Colonels assembled schoolchildren for parades so that they might learn to salute the Greek flag.’ Across a never relenting stream of traffic, motorbikes cascading from ...”

“... the first thing was just to read, non-stop, books that were never available in Pakistan: D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Isaac Deutscher’s Trotsky trilogy, Trotsky himself, other Bolshevik leaders, many others. So for me Oxford was very liberating and on many fronts. When I came to Britain, it was obvious that the United States had taken over the function ...”