“... prised them, it sets out to judge the degree to which the drama was or was not complicit with the powers of the state that seem to sustain it. Second, by inserting the ‘afterlives’ of the plays into subsequent history and by historicising salient features of ‘literature’ and ‘criticism’, it offers to assess their use as instruments of present ...”

“... of 1789, when Fox and Burke were moved, by their desire to see the Prince of Wales exercise the powers of the Crown, to language about the King’s condition neither humane nor Whiggish and forming no part of the grand harmonies of the book’s title. O’Brien makes his case, however; he leaves no doubt that Burke was driven for many years by a genuine ...”

“... was Ayr, ‘wham ne’er a town surpasses’, is authentically and variously present there. His powers of expression are at a high point of development, and are used in a wider variety of ways than they are elsewhere. Yet the epistles have usually been neglected in favour of other aspects of his work, and of conceptions of it which are more or less ...”

“... of American politics than the parallel charge of individual hypocrisy routinely levelled against Thomas Jefferson and other champions of liberty, who happened to own slaves. Institutional hypocrisy can coincide with personal hypocrisy, but it doesn’t have to. It is also consistent with deep personal sincerity, and such sincerity will often be one of its ...”

“... regimen, I should very soon be in a deplorable state of what is called nervous disease.’ Thomas Carlyle, whose own nerves had their deplorable moments, knew a fraught hidden drama when he saw one: ‘How has this man contrived, with such a nervous system, to keep alive for near sixty years?’ Given this insight, it was mischievous of Carlyle to go ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he was soon to be made Electoral Saxon and Polish Court compositeur while still employed at St Thomas’s School in Leipzig – Bach is described by Wolff as attempting to recapitulate the main outlines of his life in a genealogical sketch and family tree. In so doing he was opening a broad historical spectrum that induced him to look in two ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”