“... Edward Snowden​ was born in the summer of 1983. Around this time, the US Defence Department split its computer network into MILNET, an internal military branch, and a public branch, which we now know as the internet. Home computers were becoming pervasive; the Commodore 64 was selling in the millions. One day Snowden’s father brought one home, connected it to the TV set, and the toddler Eddie noticed that his father was now controlling what was happening on the screen ...”

“... You really cannot tell fully about a thing until the man’s work is all there,’ Auden said in an interview a few months before he died. Thanks to the magnificent efforts of Edward Mendelson, it’s now all here: prose, plays, libretti and, finally, the poems, coming to just over 7500 pages all told ...”

“... of the distance Tennyson habitually established between what, on the face of it, required to be said, and the far less public utterance that actually occurs. His strong sense of that distance is presumably what made him so docile about accepting other people’s proposals of themes to write about. On one occasion, often recalled, he remarked that in his ...”

“... paranoia, and – in particular – of the ministrations of Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, who was on the payroll of United Fruit, one of the US’s largest corporations.The players are exaggerated, almost parodic, even in the history books. There is the adman making a pitch to get involved in ...”

“... Dictionary, as economical as any modern permissivist, knew that it was too late to fret: ‘Said etymologically (like prochronism) of a date which is too early, but also used of too late a date, which has been distinguished as parachronism’. Prochronism and parachronism are widely practised and seldom ...”

“... are much more nostalgic for their racist past. In a recent YouGov poll, 59 per cent of respondents said that the British Empire was something of which to be more proud than ashamed. Defenders of British colonialism often point out that it was less brutal than the Spanish or French versions, or claim that it left the colonised better off than they would ...”

“... Obama arouses more earnest responses: apologetics, disappointment, head-shaking, Occupy, Edward Snowden. Bush’s arrogance has turned out to be that of a man destined to spend his golden years painting portraits of Putin, Merkel and Berlusconi like a dime-store Warhol working on commission for a UN theme bar. Retirement has now yielded a second book ...”

“... taught at universities about as much as I want Hitler’s writing or Stalin’s writing,’ Pipes said to an interviewer. ‘These are wild and extremist ideas that I believe have no place in a university.’ Not only does Campus Watch monitor universities for signs of ‘sedition’, i.e. views on US foreign policy, Islam, Israeli policy and Palestinian ...”

“... Edward Berger​ ’s Conclave looks rather stately at first, a matter of grand buildings, Michelangelo murals and a simple question: the pope is dead; who will succeed him? But this impression doesn’t last long. Roman buildings start to whisper their histories, murals are spectacular but often threatening, and the question is not so much who as how ...”

“... a memoir by Stella Musulin, a friend of Auden’s during his years at Kirchstetten in Austria; Edward Mendelson’s bibliography of published letters by Auden; and a symposium on Auden’s great poem ‘In Praise of Limestone’. The overall standard of critical comment and editing is exceptionally high; the depth of knowledge revealed, especially in the ...”

“... killing of King Richard II’. Fourth, at Meyrick’s trial on 5 March, the Attorney-General, Sir Edward Coke, asserted that ‘the story of Henry IV being set forth in a play, and in that play there being set forth the killing of the King upon the stage’, Meyrick and his fellows had had ‘the play of Henry IV’ performed. Finally, a Government ...”

“... do the same? Elizabeth Drew in the New Republic dismissed Fire and Fury: ‘better books’, she said, would be published soon. Better books? She mentioned David Frum’s Trumpocracy as an example, with its less than thrilling subtitle ‘The Corruption of the American Republic’. The errors of Wolff’s book, and its stylistic shortcomings, were ...”

“... is the reason Icelanders say frið sem álfkona, ‘fair as an elf-woman’, and Anglo-Saxons said ides ælfscinu, ‘elf-fair lady’. But they are dangerous too. Elves are ‘cruel for fun’, Granny Weatherwax says in Terry Pratchett’s Lords and Ladies (1992) – another hardline view, denied by some (Tolkien), maintained by others (Keats). They were ...”

“... in the Sunday hat was telling her grandson the day was too hot for sale or rent. And just as she said this and wiped the backs of her hands with a Wet Wipe, a dog came padding down the opposite sidewalk before slowing to a halt outside the green house at 83 Beals Street, the house where John Kennedy was born. The windows on the ground floor had curtains of ...”

“... sincere, but overemphatic. The Times Literary Supplement also called it sincere, and Vera Brittain said it was ‘admirably restrained’. It sold quite well, going into a second impression, and Radclyffe Hall, with her lover Una Troubridge, thought of taking a cottage in Rye. She may have felt some disappointment, having planned her novel in a crusader’s ...”