“... 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 ...”

“... initially at least, the intelligence world was taking the same high-handed line with its political masters as before. The question is: has the Thatcher Government brought the intelligence service under control and, if so, to what uses is that control being put? 5. It is clear that our intelligence services have been far more closely controlled by their ...”

“... engine types, guidance systems and fuel consumption. In 1950, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had explained the inevitability of federation in terms that every adult Eritrean can retrieve, more or less correctly, from somewhere in the mental files: ‘From the point of view of justice, the opinions of the Eritrean people must receive ...”

“... the subject of one of its famous case studies. The study was called ‘The Royal Bank of Scotland: Masters of Integration’ and began with a quote from the man we now know as Fred the Shred or the World’s Worst Banker: ‘Hard work, focus, discipline and concentrating on what our customers need. It’s quite a simple formula really, but we’ve just been ...”

“... back to the academics’. Despite some scoring against the ‘academic’ character of poets like John Ashbery (whose work is described as the ‘epitome’ of the academic in a derogatory phrase which oddly echoes the celebrative description of the footnote as the ‘epitome’ of Pound’s work), McGann has so thoroughly assimilated the phenomenon to his ...”

“... The yoking of supposedly high and low aspects of life isn’t new, it’s there in Lawrence, and John Cowper Powys finds in it a sort of transgressive holiness, but here it represents no more than a reflex of disgust.Before the ceremony a grieving relative had insisted on the coffin being opened, motivated supposedly by ‘a Huisgenoot article she read last ...”

“... can speak with more immediate authority.Was it Rich who first interrogated the nefarious word ‘masters’ in the 1990s (‘Not How to Write Poetry, But Wherefore’) or our reverence for ‘genius’ in the early 1970s (‘The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood at Last as a Sexual Message’)? She seems to have anticipated ‘self-care’: ‘I dreamed ...”

“... do, ‘but I will quote something far greater and more worthy: experience, the mistress of their masters.’ There is a touch of social defiance in this, of chippiness even: his lack of formal education, his underprivileged beginnings as an illegitimate son in the rural backwater of Vinci, are being turned into an index of his strength. His mind is free of ...”

“... the balance from persuasion to coercion. After he backed an unsuccessful Dutch proposal to let masters beat their servants – the ‘Strop Bill’, nicknamed for an Afrikaner whip – Schreiner turned on her hero for setting ‘worms of falsehood and corruption creeping’. Rhodes backed efforts to silence the political voice of Africans by stripping the ...”

“... it derives somewhat from Yeats and from Eliot, and in this country friends of mine, Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom. And a rather strange position was built up. There were great arguments that poetry was a form of knowledge, at least as valid as scientific knowledge, and in certain ways more so, because it didn’t abstract from experience. We claimed any ...”

“... and he took to heart Eliot’s suggestion (in the 1930 preface to his translation of Saint-John Perse’s Anabase) that a poet is sometimes able to write poetry in what is called prose. In Parenthesis marries contemporary speech to the sovereignties of self-contained utterance, around which questions of genre arrange themselves as best they can. It ...”

“... the aristocratic Calthorpe Estate, which was still tending it carefully as late as the 1960s, when John Madin was commissioned to design by far the best modernist housing in the city for the area. Other social improvement plans have grown out of it: Edgbaston adjoins Aston Webb’s overripe Victorian university buildings, and is close to the rangier, folksier ...”

“... an ‘example of unfair burden sharing’ and ‘using a hatchet when you need a scalpel’ when John McCain proposed it during the campaign of 2008. In the same speech, Obama embraced the false analogy between federal budgets and household budgets, overlooking (for starters) the government’s control of taxation and the money supply. ‘Families across the ...”

“... who died in 2017, was one of the greatest moral thinkers of the past century, perhaps even since John Stuart Mill. Edmonds rightly believes that if Parfit’s ideas about personal identity, rationality and equality were absorbed into our moral and political thinking, they would radically alter our beliefs about punishment, the distribution of social ...”

“... prisons. This project now has the support of most of the Israeli press and academics. We are the masters. We work and travel. They can make their living by policing their own people. We drive on the highways. They must live across the hills. The hills are ours. So are the fences. We control the roads, and the checkpoints and the borders. We control their ...”