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“... France, it has often been said, is a democracy with the manners of an absolute monarchy. Think of the ceremonial splendour with which French presidents surround themselves, the haughty, distant style they tend to adopt, or the way relationships within their entourages tend to mimic, with delicious self-consciousness, patterns of favouritism and intrigue developed long ago at the court of Versailles ...”

“... Of the essays collected and excellently translated in Dissemination, the best example of Derrida’s own practice of the deconstructive criticism he fathered is ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’.* Here he pursues his question why the metaphysical tradition from Plato to the present subordinates writing to speech. Derrida is not claiming to reverse Plato and to subordinate speech acts to écriture, intentions to texts ...”

“... After a decade or more dominated by special studies of anonymous or bestselling authors now suitable for academic recovery, Philip Fisher’s Still the New World marks a return in some ways to an older and less suspicious idea of ‘classic American literature’. Fisher is a critic who has written extensively on realist prose and painting, and his new book is a commentary on Emerson, Whitman, Melville, James and Twain, among others, with significant asides on Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer ...”

“... Question: What is the basic idea in your philosophy? Bloch: That I cannot see anything at very close quarters, anything that presents itself in front of my eyes. There has to be distance ... Proverbs express it very simply: ‘The weaver knows not what he weaves’; ‘At the foot of the lighthouse there is no light’; ‘The prophet is without honour in his own country ...”

“... At the height of Empire, and of the literature of Empire, J.K. Stephen looked forward to a time When there stands a muzzled stripling,     Mute, beside a muzzled bore, When the Rudyards cease from Kipling     And the Haggards Ride no more. The Haggards have ridden rather precariously since the decline of Empire, if at all. But the next few years promise no end of Kipling ...”

“... Martha Nussbaum is a classical scholar and moral philosopher who in several books and a great many essays has advanced a thesis about the cognitive power of emotions. Feeling, she says, is part of thought. Only accidents of usage and the rationalist prepossessions of modern philosophy could have made us think otherwise. Her evidence covers a wide range, from Plato and Aristotle to Proust and Henry James, and though she takes a critical interest in thinkers, mostly of the Stoic tradition, who have promoted the rival virtues of self-sufficiency, she writes to call attention to those who preach and practise sympathy ...”

“... There are​ more weird households per novel in the work of Elizabeth Bowen than in that of any comparable writer. She liked to imagine the nuclear family as radically estranged from itself – by the death of a parent or a child, by childlessness, by emergency or neglect. Twenty-year-old Roderick Rodney in The Heat of the Day (1948) ‘would have esteemed, for instance, organic family life ...”

“... Until recently, one of the most remarkable unbeaten records in sport belonged to a football manager, the much reviled Portuguese provocateur and clotheshorse José Mourinho. Before Real Madrid lost 1-0 at home to Sporting Gijón on 2 April, no team managed by Mourinho had lost a home league game for more than nine years, a sequence spanning four different clubs in four different countries (Mourinho has also managed Porto, Chelsea and Inter Milan) and lasting 150 matches ...”

“... Anyone old enough to have made use of public phone booths on a regular basis will know that they were more often than not damp, cold, filthy and foul-smelling, and while amply supplied with the phone numbers of prostitutes, practically impossible to make any sort of call from. So folk memory insists, at any rate. So literature insists too. Urban phone booths in particular have become indelibly associated in the literary imagination with urine ...”

“... In the final year of the last century, George Stephanopoulos, Bill Clinton’s one-time aide and press secretary, published a memoir of his time in the White House entitled All Too Human: A Political Education. Back then, it seemed like a terribly exciting book: 1999 was the year of Clinton’s Senate trial, following his impeachment, and also of the first appearance on US television of The West Wing, which offered the fantasy of a different kind of liberal president ...”

“... Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the longest-serving president in American history – 12 years and a month. He won four elections and forged a Democratic majority that lasted into the 1960s. When he took office in March 1933 the US banking system had collapsed and a quarter of the workforce was unemployed. When he died in April 1945 Americans were enjoying unprecedented prosperity and victory in the war had catapulted the country from the margins of international politics to the rank of global superpower ...”

“... Is Iraq Tony Blair’s Suez? The parallels are certainly hard to avoid, and Blair’s critics have not been slow to point them out. First, there is a strong suspicion that, like Suez, the whole Iraq escapade was the result of a private deal cooked up between the belligerents. The decision to send British and French troops to Egypt in 1956 was sealed during a secret meeting at Sèvres in France, where British, French and Israeli representatives agreed on a plan that would allow the Israelis to attack the Egyptians, and the British and French to intervene in order to separate them, reclaiming the canal in the process ...”

“... The wisdom of crowds: why the many are smarter than the few. We-think: the power of mass creativity. Infotopia: how many minds produce knowledge. Wikinomics: how mass collaboration changes everything. These are the titles of just a few of the books published in recent years on one of the hot topics of the moment: knowledge aggregation, or how lots of different people knowing many small things can result in a very big deal for everyone ...”

“... The best one-volume encyclopedia in the world used to be the Columbia Encyclopedia, first published by Columbia University Press in 1935. In our house we have the fifth edition, from 1993, and we still get it out occasionally to look up kings and queens and old-fashioned stuff like that. It’s a lovely book, fat but portable and full of nuggety little entries on most things you can think of ...”

“... Preston Sturges​ died in August 1959, when Donald Trump was thirteen years old. So it’s not his fault that the uses to which the grandiose Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach has more recently been put include the development of a club of which Jeffrey Epstein was briefly a member, as well as an impromptu storage facility for state secrets. But he did rather like the atmosphere of the place ...”