“... makes clear, the cliché of the Victorians as sexually ignorant and repressed is misguided. They may have thought differently about sex from their grandchildren but they didn’t think about it less, and in 1858, after the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act came into effect on 1 January, they thought and talked about it a great deal. Divorce in England had ...”

“... population is draining away and the area is too cut off to be supplied militarily. The​ YPG may not have fought to the end for Afrin, but they will certainly fight if Turkish forces move further east to attack Manbij or the Kurdish towns and cities close to the Turkish border. Erdoğan promises a broader offensive to stamp out ‘terrorists’ in the ...”

“... university philosophy departments was such that, as Eastman recalled, ‘rays of his influence may have helped to mould me long before I heard of him.’ The guiding principle of the philosophical approach William James defined as ‘pragmatism’ was that ideas and beliefs are not inherently true, or right, but are made so by their practical ...”

“... know,’ I said. ‘It seems to me the government wants us to keep our hearings going, come what may.’‘You’re right, they’re buggers. But this case is a thousand pages. Seventeen witnesses, we’ll never get through it in four days.’‘Then ask the judge,’ I said to him. ‘If she’s not keen on hearing it, nothing I can say will make it ...”

“... long-term dictator of the Dominican Republic, and on the aftermath of his assassination on 30 May 1961. Trujillo, trained as an American marine, had been in power since 1930. He was President more than once, and when he wasn’t he ran the country through a puppet President he nominated. He modernised agriculture and industry, sharpened up the Army, and ...”

“... time of writing, and for a period thereafter. Diarists seem to like to fear that their disclosures may be chanced on by their most intimate companions: husbands, parents, wives – those people in their lives who think they know what’s really going on. Does this mean that diarists – like adulterers (and most diarists do seem to be adulterers) – are ...”

“... second major setback was Binyamin Netanyahu’s victory against Shimon Peres in the elections of May 1996. Netanyahu was a sworn enemy of the Oslo Accords, viewing them as incompatible both with Israel’s security and with its historic right to the Biblical homeland. But he knew that two thirds of the Israeli public supported the Accords and the policy of ...”

“... himself for all eternity. When Žižek’s psychoanalytic revolutionaries are leaving society they may pass Hardt’s and Negri’s multitude going the other way, for the path of the multitude goes into and through Empire. Hardt and Negri accept that there is a place for refusal and exodus, but complain that ‘refusal in itself (of work, authority, and ...”

“... with periods of decline in the public school system more generally. Christopher Wordsworth may have been an unworldly incompetent, who was said to have breathed ‘the atmosphere of the Council of Nicaea’ rather than Harrow-on-the-Hill, but his ineptness cannot explain why Westminster’s pupil numbers were also plummeting (from 300 in 1821 to 67 ...”

“... with that logic-interrupting lunch in Bloomsbury: what stopped him in his tracks that day in May 1910 was the startling realisation that the performances of Old Masters such as Hogarth and Gainsborough, hanging in some dining-room in Coram’s Fields, were being outstripped in quality by those of his own contemporaries. Here among his fellows, a path to ...”

“... handful of letters. The result falls well short of compelling. Although reading this volume may not bear comparison to struggling across no-man’s-land, it is certainly a hard slog. More to the point, as with many of the operations that Haig planned, it comes nowhere near achieving its intended objective. In their introduction, Gary Sheffield and John ...”

“... than to imagine a young American who has lived in Europe and inherits a fortune in America? It may be a matter of genre, and James, in a letter I’ll quote from more fully in a moment, speaks of verisimilitude. But are ghosts more relaxing in any other respect? And we might think the war would have made Europe, even the Europe of the 1820s, harder to ...”

“... consciousness of unique worth – so valuable, in fact, that in this new novel Lodge suspects it may be the summum bonum. ‘Consciousness’ – the very term has an inescapably reifying ring to it – is the transcendent truth of the modern liberal age. The novelist is its high priest, and the novel is its scripture. The image of the solitary author ...”

“... to the 1976 edition of Jill is good testimony, though a rather different sense of the place may be had from Wain’s Sprightly Running, with its magnificent memoir of E.H.W. Meyerstein. The young man from the Potteries was greatly taken with this weird upper-class eccentric, and for a long time afterwards plugged his un-Movementish poetry. Wain was also ...”

“... Namierites, or even Whigs. Most believe that blooms come best in mixed bunches. They may allow themselves some guarded asides on the psychology of chiliasm, but would reject Norman Cohn’s full-frontal psychopathology of anti-semitism. They probably accept, as true for that decade, Sir Lewis Namier’s vision of the politics of the 1760s as ...”