“... book is fastidious about segregating Yiddish and vernacular American speech from the narrator’s self-consciously literary English, which even uses British rather than American spelling. In an essay published in 1990, Hana Wirth-Nesher argued that David experiences the English language as ‘a foreign culture inhabiting his psyche. Whether he desires it or ...”

“... grown in step with the expansion of Anglo-America’s intellectual and cultural capital. Lilla, a self-declared ‘centrist liberal’, arrived at his present position by way of working-class Detroit, evangelical Christianity and an early flirtation with neoconservatism. The British writers belong to a traditional elite; shared privilege transcends ...”

“... other than with the Almighty, played a secondary role. The nub of this doctrine is ‘To thine own self be true,’ where integrity – saying what one conscientiously thinks, or at least not saying what one doesn’t think – is central, just as it is in John Rawls’s theory of justice of 1971. The claim that access to speech matters doesn’t flatly ...”

“... the one case in a million where judicial wrongdoing might go unredressed. This is not quite as self-interested as it sounds. The threat of litigation which hangs over every American operating theatre and consulting room, and increasingly over every British one too, has a palpable effect on the way medicine is practised. Undoubtedly the fear of litigation ...”

“... hearings and the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on President Reagan’s nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. In both cases national telecasts offered Americans a civic education. They now have a far greater understanding of the Constitution than they could possibly have gained from a dozen or more Bicentennial celebrations. Judge Bork ...”

“... to do so: it is the first great piece of luck on which his career has flourished. The second, as Robert Harris points out, was the date of his birth: Kinnock is just old enough to have imbibed at first hand from his parents, uncles and grandparents vivid memories of the hardship and degradation of Tredegar between the wars, but just young enough to have ...”

“... Press. During my visit I am informed that this first-ever biography of Kadar was inspired by Robert Maxwell during a visit to Budapest. People talk about Mr Kadar with an affection that surprises me. ‘He says in public what he says in private,’ says an editor I meet at a party, who considers that as rare a trait among politicians as I do. On the day ...”

“... concerned. Only a few weeks after Elizabeth’s funeral on 28 April 1603, her chief minister Sir Robert Cecil was saying of her that she was ‘more than a man, and, in troth, sometime less than a woman’. As James’s reign progressed, Cecil (like many others) became less and less inclined to be critical of ‘our blessed Queen’s time’, but his ...”

“... the ways in which a particular thought form (a ‘consciousness’, as Hegel put it), or again a self-defeating project, can be necessarily involved in or presupposed by a social relationship or other historically-given development. Hegel had one big dark answer to that question; Marxists have lots of active answers, but they tend to scurry off when ...”

“... of the poem’s creation become so much its theme that there is soon a disastrous lapse into self-consciousness, coy internal reference, sly tomfoolery and baragouin. This may be explicable in a number of ways, apart from by the sheer artificiality of the gimmick. The four poets were, we may assume, deeply versed in the two traditions which they were ...”

“... Philadelphia School of Design for Women. She was influenced by the work of the American painter Robert Henri, who had founded the Ashcan School – a movement that championed gritty depictions of urban scenes. ‘I didn’t want to be taught Impressionism,’ Neel explained. ‘I didn’t see life as Picnic on the Grass. I wasn’t happy like Renoir.’ Her ...”

“... of winning popular acclaim while affecting to disdain it, which most gratified Taylor’s self-esteem, as he more or less admitted. Thus he relished not only the fact that he was for years the most popular lecturer in the Oxford History Faculty, but also that his lectures were scheduled at the most unpropitious hour, which correspondingly inflated his ...”

“... date of composition. It was the first-century Jewish writer Josephus, taking a pot-shot at Greek self-esteem, who first suggested Homer had been illiterate, but it was not until the Twenties that the Californian Milman Parry set out to prove Josephus right. He dressed up in traditional Serbian costume and went looking for Homer in the highlands of ...”

“... for ‘nine-tenths of the reading of the reading public’. When, in 1928, Laura Riding and Robert Graves’s Pamphlet against Anthologies charged the genre with reducing poetry to a ‘packet-commodity’, the only alternative that they proposed revealed just how inescapable the anthology had become. The ‘full Corpus’ that could drive anthologies ...”

“... media?’ Borrow, it seems to me, never quite found that middle way. He tried very hard to fit his self-expression to the strict party-line of his religious superiors, but then he found he had disciplined himself so firmly that he was no longer free to write from the heart. The letters were as close as he could get to the party-line and he obviously did not ...”