“... tea-cup opensA lane to the land of the dead.These vistas owe something to Auden’s first love, Thomas Hardy, and especially to what he described as Hardy’s way of ‘looking at life from a very great height’, his willingness ‘to see the individual life related not only to the local social life of its time, but to the whole of human history, life on ...”

“... like a mug’s game at the best of times, with all those writers perpetually at the peak of their powers, but there’s a special reason for the whistling-in-the-dark tone of the cover copy for Neel Mukherjee’s fourth novel, Choice – ‘breathtaking and devastating’ it says, as a placeholder, on the proof, though the finished version settles on ‘a ...”

“... Atotoxtli’s way of raising one eyebrow and lowering the other really ‘have given her ruling powers anywhere’? It seems unlikely that communication in a vanished hierarchical society could map so smoothly onto the conventions of soap opera, for example when an underlying meaning needs to be signalled (‘He arched his eyebrows when he said ...”

“... impossibility comes their case for reading James, who can play Nurse, reminding us of the curative powers of exercising free will. But, as Alice wants us to ask, would it always be ‘best’ to get up? Her life and writings complicate a neat picture of health as merely a matter of flexing sufficient will to be well.Neither​ Sutton nor Kaag/van Belle bring ...”

“... to plunder Ireland, under the direction of Maurice Thomson and associates of such later fame as Thomas Rainsborough and Hugh Peter; and a naval rampage round the Spanish possessions in the Caribbean, from Maracaibo to Jamaica to Guatemala, in collusion with Warwick. Once the fighting in England broke out, the same syndicate moved into control of the ...”

“... Chislett(Company)Victoria Glendinning(Listener)Ian Hamilton(Sunday Times)Tim Heald(Now)Thomas Hinde(Sunday Telegraph)Bernard Levin(Sunday Times)Blake Morrison(TLS)John Nicholson(Times)Richard Rayner(Time Out)Anthony Thwaite(Observer)MiddlingPaul Ableman(Spectator)Peter Conrad(Harpers & Queen)Alan Hollinghurst(New Statesman)Christopher ...”

“... in Britain and America, and exemplified by even such relatively liberated analytic philosophers as Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams) contrasts ‘hard scientific fact’ with ‘the subjective’ or with ‘metaphor’, the second kind – common elsewhere in the world – sees science as one more human activity, not as the place at which human beings ...”

“... of such senior judges as the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Taylor and the Master of the Rolls, Sir Thomas Bingham, and just about every pressure group in the country seems devoted to the cause. The only people standing against this grain would appear to be those Tories who happen to be in power, and this to many is yet another (perhaps a conclusive) argument ...”

“... writing overlapped, as a glance at the careers of Ben Jonson or Fulke Greville or Samuel Daniel or Thomas May reminds us. Hayward’s book was a work to tempt a dramatist. Manning, its editor, who has no case to make about the connection between the book and the stage, nevertheless remarks on the ‘dramatic architecture’ of the book, on Hayward’s ...”

“... away from his earlier uncertain styles, which were close enough to Auden and Yeats and Dylan Thomas to be called vaguely Modernist, even faintly distractive. The speech he found was in direct contrast: a weighty, easy and conversable social intimacy, occasionally spoken of later by critics in terms of the British bar parlour. And certainly, this was one ...”

“... symbol to Adorno was the figure of the ageing, deaf and isolated composer that it turns up in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus – Adorno gave Mann a great deal of help with the novel – in the form of a lecture on Beethoven’s final period given by Adrian Leverkühn’s composition teacher, Wendell Kretschmar: Beethoven’s art had overgrown ...”

“... latter sees ‘globalisation as an apolitical phenomenon in which ‘nations, states and military powers do not exist’. Fuelled by missionary societies such as the American Enterprise Institute and evangelical tracts such as Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree (2000), this religion has led to what Amy Chua ...”

“... a self-image of openness to the world but has the potential to keep the world’s big non-European powers, state and corporate, at arm’s length.I confessed to Boys I’d taken a peek at his Twitter feed. The header photo is a picture of his yellow Lotus sports car. I said I noticed he’d been tweeting supportively about Greta Thunberg and he agreed ...”

“... parsonical, live a more fulfilled or rewarding life.Of course we know that there are limits to our powers. We are born with a certain temperament, and that temperament in turn is modified, by no means always for the better, by our upbringing and circumstances. If we try to change ourselves and bring our worse defects more under control, retribution follows. In ...”

“... as ‘a businessman with a sense of history’, spiels his pitch as the oligarch’s gin-palace powers under Tower Bridge. Thirty years on and he could be making his final plea as a candidate in the London Mayoral Election, right across the river from the crumpled buttock of City Hall. Which is neither a hall, nor in the City, but an architectural doodle ...”