“... that ‘belong’ elsewhere. ‘Elsewhere’, what they do over there, defines ‘here’, what we do in our shop; the identity of an activity, that which enables you to know it when you see it, is radically dependent on everything from which it would be distinguished. Nothing stands alone; no discipline is an island; no fact – be it ...”

“... The question of how we are to take Iris Murdoch’s characters (indeed, whether we can take them at all) is raised, even before we get to know them, by their names. In The Green Knight we have to contend with Lucas and Clement Graffe, Harvey Blacket, Bellamy James and his dog Anax, the Anderson women – Louise and her daughters Alethea (Aleph), Sophia (Sefton) and Moira (Moy) – Emil and Clive and the Adwardens ...”

“... Braun) who drooled over her ‘personality compulsion, something of the Führer Kontakt’. And it George Younger, then Secretary of State for Scotland, who remarked of her post-Falklands address to the Scottish Conservative Party in 1982, that it reminded him of ‘the Nuremberg rally’. Countries which believe themselves to be in a mess are easily attracted ...”

“... a passing reference in early accounts of the colony to a convict stage production. The play was George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer and the occasion the King’s birthday, 1789. Apparently, the convicts’ efforts to please ‘were not unattended with applause’. It is a queer little episode. The honoured king was mad. Europe itself was a little mad ...”

“... Labour found difficult to grasp. Corbyn spelled it out himself in one of the TV debates: We also as a party have to face up to something which is an unpleasant truth, that we fought the 2015 election on very good policies included in the manifesto but fundamentally we were going ...”

“... Sheena and I weren’t like that, but then I don’t remember going to many parties. Instead, we drove around Scotland, and went to a lot of plays – my first piece in the LRB was about seeing Happy Days with her at the National. ‘In as much as I thought I could know someone, I thought I knew her,’ I’d say, though when I Google her now, I still ...”

“... are deployed in almost every country in the world. The point of covert action, of course, is that we’re supposed to know very little about it. But here the system falls down, since even secret operatives can’t help the occasional boast. After every famous mission – an assassination, a ‘rescue’, a counterinsurgency strike – former special forces ...”

“... the stern rose in the water, four great propellers could be clearly discerned. Then she was gone. George Henderson was only six at the time. ‘I can still sit here now,’ he told a TV crew in 1994, ‘and see that great liner just sliding below the waves.’ The Lusitania, launched by Cunard in June 1906 to wrest transatlantic traffic back from the ...”

“... in Boston. Earlier books had revealed that Kennedy took a number of different medications, and we were vaguely aware at the time that he had a bad back, but Dallek’s new information about the extent of Kennedy’s health problems is astonishing. He does not treat the matter salaciously: how Kennedy dealt with his poor health becomes evidence of his ...”

“... between them when they see me peeking in wistfully at the window. One has to slink away into tall bush at back of the yard, then somehow freshen up with the garden hose. Reminds me, like so many things, of my sad childhood – one much worse than Sonia Sotomayor’s. And yes, it’s undeniable: packing up several decades’ worth of precious tat at the old ...”

“... or been a more fluent speaker; if Howard had offered Cameron the shadow chancellorship or George Osborne had not accepted it – if these or any number of other contingencies had been otherwise, Cameron might not have become leader. Yet he has been perceived as an unstoppable force, the author of an irreversible transformation in his party that has ...”

“... about post-Enlightenment man. By the early 20th century the aggressive bourgeois ego which George Santayana saw emerge in the industrialising US – the go-getting American with no higher aim than diligent imitation of the rich – was already under siege in Europe by oversized and complex political and economic systems. Sociologists had identified ...”

“... in wait For what I should, yet never can, remember: No garden appears, no path, no hoar-green bush Of Lad’s-love, or Old Man, no child beside, Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate; Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end. (‘Old Man’) It is odd, as John Bayley noted in an essay two decades ago, how frequently the poetry conveys its most ...”

“... either). Liberals misread Trump’s talk of unity and unification since winning the election ( ‘We will unite and we will win, win, win!’ he tweeted on 12 November) if they imagine it as conciliatory. Unity is possible only on the populist’s own terms; since nobody else can truly speak for the people, dissent and ...”

“... a narrative effect, the insertion of a later perspective (real or imagined) into an earlier one. We may be a little surprised to see Iris Murdoch playing with the Russian Formalists’ distinction of story and plot (fabula and syuzhet, events in their chronological order and events in the order of their arrangement). Or even to see her playing at all. But ...”