“... Bill Clinton, then a leading congressman and finally Obama’s chief of staff. Some felt that he may have been headed for the White House in his own right. But he has no regrets. Who would want to be president these days? He thinks the federal government is where good ideas go to die. Cities like Chicago are where it’s at. It just takes mayors like him to ...”

“... rigorously at work in the later films as in the early ones. Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible may belong unequivocally to the Socialist Realist epic-heroic mode. But, Arsenjuk argues, they transform that mode from within by frequent recourse to the theatrical-grotesque, thus ‘putting into crisis’ its ‘ideological function’. The climax of Alexander ...”

“... in a brand-new, sharp-focus print at the National Film Theatre and the Screen on the Hill, was a David O. Selznick film, ‘a picturisation’ as the title credits have it, of a very successful novel. ‘We bought Rebecca,’ Selznick wrote in a memo objecting strenuously to a first draft of the screenplay, ‘and we intend to make Rebecca.’ That was the ...”

“... and dominated popular understanding of the nations’s common past for more than half a century. David Cannadine’s characteristically spirited and combative study is more than just an intellectual biography: it is a work of piety, advocacy and passion. He uses the corpus of Trevelyan’s historical writings over fifty years – Wycliffe, Garibaldi, the ...”

“... to come across the wispy voice of Leonard Woolf, asked in an interview broadcast by the BBC on 23 May 1964 to define his wife’s ‘genius’ or ‘special attributes’. ‘Normally,’ he responded,she was extremely happy and enjoyed all the usual things of life, but every now and then in conversation, for instance, she would do what I call leave the ...”

“... Japanese. When befriended by two sailors, almost the first thing that occurs to him is that they may want to eat him. There are scenes in the latter part of the book, when Jim is hallucinated by exhaustion and hunger, that owe a good deal to the author’s interest in Science Fiction. Typical of them are a sudden fall of hail after the defeated Japanese have ...”

“... was preceded by Paris (1810-13), where he spent a year ‘beneath the eye’ of Jacques-Louis David. Here he received the full stamp of French neoclassicism. But David, whom Eckersberg described as a ‘very rigorous and precise teacher’, was also ‘against submission to one particular overall style’, and ...”

“... used. The second in a series of ‘Critical Bibliographies in Modern History’ (the first, by David Nicholls, covers the 19th century), it is a handbook for ‘school-teachers, lecturers and students’ who ‘clearly need guidance about what has been coming out, and about whether some beloved work has stood the test of time’. John Morrill has ...”

“... child growing up in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side a few years before the First World War. David Schearl, the protagonist, lives in terror of his father, an implacably resentful man called Albert, who boils with rage every evening while recounting real or imagined workplace slights: ‘They look at me crookedly, with mockery in their eyes! How much can ...”

“... Murrays, the firm was taken over by Hodder Headline (a component of the W.H. Smith empire) in May 2002, for £17m. Another gobbet for the conglomerate soup. The archive, which includes memorabilia such as Byron’s trophy collection of his lovers’ pubic hair, was retained as personal property by the Murray family, who have assured the NLS that any money ...”

“... of Britain, or at least of London, in 1990, then one thing is obvious: some of his earlier heroes may have been angry and difficult, but now Uncle Kingsley is telling us he likes it here. For Amis to take as his protagonist a retired librarian, sensitive to the shades of his own and others’ feelings and with a strong sense of proper and improper uses of ...”

“... feminised in a spinsterish way, New England at its oldest. Then this: Have there been, we may ask, any successful efforts to escape from the genteel tradition, and to express something worth expressing behind its back? ... I might mention the humorists, of whom you here in California have had your share. The humorists, however, only half escape the ...”

“... How long​ do we have left, and how bad will it get? David Wallace-Wells opens his book with a short, sharp reality check: ‘It’s worse, much worse, than you think.’ All the news is bad. Marshalling research from across the sprawling field of climate studies, Wallace-Wells paints a picture of disastrous change on an almost incomprehensible scale ...”

“... leader. Would he – could he? – perform the countless vital tasks that come naturally to David Cameron or Tony Blair: everything from how to comport yourself at the despatch box to the best way to climb out of a chauffeur-driven car, from how to use an autocue to knowing which pop band to choose on Desert Island Discs. If you don’t know which tie ...”

“... structure should, however, offer many points of entry to whatever sections of the Complete Edition may be made available to English readers during the coming years. Like the 1974 anthology, it begins with the ‘Philosophy of Music’ from Geist der Utopie, and ends with a corresponding excerpt from Das Prinzip Hoffnung; between, there is a shorter selection ...”