“... one another with scarcely space to breathe. Only by sleight of hand could contradictory aims find swift and plausible reconciliation, and this was merely a flattering façade: the underlying crisis would sooner or later break out with the force of pent-up fury. A prime instance of this was the simultaneous and self-interested offering of Palestine as a ...”

“... convince his courtiers that he had gone mad, triggering his assassination and the Cossacks’ swift recall. Next, Russia fought a series of successful wars with Iran in the Caucasus, securing Georgia, Dagestan and most of Azerbaijan in 1813 and Eastern Armenia in 1828. Russia then attacked the Ottoman lands in the Western Caucasus and took the strategic ...”

“... the card was never sent. A. 2042, of course, made the job of censoring correspondence easier. A swift glance was all that was needed to reveal an illicit inscription. Some senders invented codes to circumvent scrutiny. Wilfred Owen made an arrangement with his mother that, if the phrase ‘I am being sent down to the base’ was crossed out with a double ...”

“... of men trying to escape from the institution of marriage. (Every middle-aged man his own Houdini?) Jonathan, the narrator of ‘Lives of the Poets’, has gone to earth in a pied-à-terre in Greenwich Village, leaving his wife stranded in upstate New York. Jonathan’s solitude is supposedly for writing in, though what he ...”

“... more under their control – a fatal mistake and for Sima Qian a main reason for the dynasty’s swift demise. As for the ambiguities and hesitancies of the political assassin there can be few better portraits than those of the bombastic, bibulous Jing Ke and the blinded musician Gao Jianli – the one slashing at the panic-stricken Emperor with his ...”

“... of Transkei, Venda and the other Bantustans. On 14 January, the UN called on Israel to ‘ensure swift and equitable access to Covid-19 vaccines for the Palestinian people under occupation’. Yuli Edelstein, the Israeli health minister, rebuffed this with reference to the Oslo Accords, which give the Palestinian Authority oversight of public health. The ...”

“... the utopian notion that Brexit Britain can turn itself into a European Singapore by negotiating swift free trade agreements with the rest of the world. It also seems that governments looking for popular legitimacy will need to show an ability to control their borders. There is a highly plausible view that the democratic revolt of 2016 against oligarchical ...”

“... those of us who were finding the suspense already unendurable were looking to 4 March to provide a swift dénouement. Then stuff happened – news of Professor Goolsbee’s clandestine visit to the Canadian Consulate, the ‘red phone’ TV ad, the start of the Antoin Rezko trial – and the Texas and Ohio primary results made clear that this book has at least ...”

“... Jonathan Franzen​ has been compared to 19th-century greats: to Tolstoy, to Dickens. In respect of his best and most successful book, The Corrections, the praise carries a false hint of the retrograde, of revival of old forms or subject matter. Published at the turn of the millennium, The Corrections is a work of its time, not for its topical themes of dementia, the medicated society or stock market chicanery but for its approach to family ...”

“... between the rival realms of Europe, an idea developed in England by Charles Davenant and Jonathan Swift; on the other, in the ideal of a federation of states to secure the peaceful unity of the continent, as proposed by the Abbé de Saint-Pierre in France. The first became canonical in the diplomatic chancelleries of the time. The second ...”

“... when they see it – unless they’re as dim as the Irish bishop who is supposed to have said of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels that ‘for his part he hardly believed a word of it’ (‘hardly’ is a deliciously bishoply way of hedging his bets). Satire is a slippery beast because it’s often treated as a ‘mode’ of writing rather than a ...”

“... catalogue as ‘A Collection of 24 works, lettered “Libels on Pope”, being attacks on Pope and Swift’. Although the catalogue gives no indication that this is so, the four volumes in fact contain Pope’s own collection of attacks on himself. He has written at the front of the first volume a slightly amended quotation from the Book of Job: ‘Behold it ...”

“... be done could only be done by you. ‘You may be so far ahead with Goldsmith that this book about Swift would not fit well,’ says the typewritten note in the last book he sent me, ‘but it might be mentioned. Goldsmith and Grub Street, then and now, does seem a subject in need of your comments.’ London was always the place for me, and the London Review ...”

“... to spread alarm at what Corbynism beyond Brexit would look like. It’s difficult to see a neat or swift end to this conflict; it’s likely to take more than one election to resolve. If it continues, will Remain – or Rejoin – persist as a potent political identity, or eventually lose traction? Will Labour be able to return politics to ...”

“... Dutch conversations. But in the context of English society in the mid-1720s (the society of Pope, Swift and Gay), van Aken’s classical sculptures would have been read as mock-heroic comments on the scene pictured. A Bacchus standing above a tea service, which Solkin reads as admonitory (‘Better drink tea, not strong spirits’), would more likely ...”