“... to shield him from the charge of being a closet republican, or a classical republican like John Toland. He believes in a ‘legal limited monarchy’, and has a humane idea of consensus and national unity within such an arrangement. He is an active, adept pragmatist, a revolutionary moderate. In Robinson Crusoe, Defoe speaks of Crusoe’s ‘life of ...”

“... and old-fashioned time indicators such as ‘presently’ (lifted, according to his friend John Spurling, from Richard Hughes). And he renders his characters’ inner voices oddly, sometimes putting thoughts in quotation marks, sometimes using free indirect style and sometimes forgetting which of the two he’s doing. From time to time this makes ...”

“... have a memory of sitting there and feeling smug,’ she wrote of attending a class taught by John Crowe Ransom in 1938. She identified as a Trotskyite, placing herself on the anti-Stalinist left along with the writers she admired: Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy.Hardwick wanted to flee to New York, like ‘a provincial in Balzac, yearning ...”

“... taste of the Stephen children and the Stephen parents by describing the fall from favour of G.F. Watts. He was a family connection – his portraits of Sir Leslie and Julia Stephen found their way to Gordon Square, along with photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron, when the orphaned Stephens set up house there in 1904. But he was not a hero. At the 1903 ...”

“... by such luminaries of the conservative movement as Congressman Larry McDonald (head of the John Birch Society), Fred and Phyllis Schafly, Ray Cline (former deputy-director of the CIA), General Daniel Graham (now leader of the High Frontier – i.e. Star Wars – lobby) and Reed Irvine. Irvine brought a fresh raft of influential supporters into the ...”

“... Lula took power we were toothless,’ Luis Humberto of the federal police union told Jonathan Watts of the Guardian. ‘The Workers’ Party increased our budget, upgraded our equipment and gave us more authority. It is ironic. They lost power because they did the right thing.’Car Wash has become intensely politicised in Brazil, making it easy to lose ...”

“... Among the critics of Obama’s policies towards the auto industry is the Democratic Representative John Dingell of Michigan, the longest serving member of the House, and a long-time ally of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. ‘I’m troubled by the different treatment of auto companies … and the treatment of those good-hearted people such as AIG and all ...”

“... the Ohio Browning has met. Reviewing its first two volumes, one of its severest critics, the late John Pettigrew, found that they didn’t make him want to modify the statement that ‘there is nothing remotely like a good scholarly edition of the works.’ It was, in fact, the problems of the Ohio Browning that made the editors of the Oxford Browning turn ...”

“... with the job, the baton passed to civil servants and to a junior minister responsible for energy, John Battle. Battle was from Leeds, a Catholic and an activist for social justice whose life until that point – studying the poetry of William Empson, training for the priesthood, setting up Church Action on Poverty to campaign for a minimum wage and mastering ...”

“... but it didn’t matter: I read and reread the piece that summer. Sharply written by Michael Watts, it covered the aftermath of the Pistols’ split at the end of a disastrous American tour; the fitful struggle to make a Sex Pistols movie; McLaren’s dalliance with managing the Slits; the fatal stabbing of Nancy Spungen, holed up with Sid Vicious in the ...”

“... and the operations of imperial oil, inevitably stoked a strong nationalist reaction. By 1958, John Foster Dulles reluctantly acknowledged the limits of Big Oil geo-strategy, conceding that nationalism ‘made it more difficult for the oil companies to maintain a decent position’. Mosadeq in Iran, Abdul Karim Qasim in Iraq, Pérez Alfonso in Venezuela ...”

“... just finished Ashley Kahn’s absorbing history of a date, ‘A Love Supreme’: The Creation of John Coltrane’s Classic Album.* Trane was a nice sheets-of-sound antidote to the ormolu, love-nests and scheming courtiers of the Ancien Régime. Yet despite having a workable assortment of Mulligans and Bakers and Konitzes, I was also feeling vaguely ...”