“... we sometimes call Augustan, of which the dominant representatives in Fielding’s lifetime were Swift and Pope. Early in his career he sometimes called himself Scriblerus Secundus, after their famous coterie the Scriblerus Club. One of his earliest poems, however, was an unfinished mock-Dunciad against them, discovered some twenty years ago by Isobel Grundy ...”

“... be a minor typographical variant of the shorthand for ‘manuscript’. Casey Miller and Kate Swift, in Words and Women (1976), say Ms has been around since the 1940s, but remained largely unused and didn’t get into a dictionary until 1972. One factor in its resurgence was ‘the growth of direct mail selling’, for which the abbreviation was felt to ...”

“... modesty, he can at times seem slightly crazy in his ambitions, as if he has been invented by Swift. For Spinoza, as for most laymen at all times, philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom and of the salvation and happiness to be realised only in the right conduct of life. Philosophy takes over the functions of the historical religions, and the theory of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”