“... and represented faithfully enough the main current of cultivated thought of their day.’That may, however, be a little too diminishing, or at least it fails to account for the journal’s novelty and impact. The periodical culture of the first half of the 19th century had been dominated by stately quarterlies, led by the Whig Edinburgh Review, founded in ...”

“... the critic as well as the biographer. They show how unlike temperaments of near-equivalent talent may be drawn together by unanimity of literary principle. This unanimity should therefore be worth looking into, especially in the case of work like Philip Larkin’s, always more reserved and elusive than it seems. I want to consider his writing in juxtaposition ...”

“... Nargis struck Myanmar (let’s use the place names used by the World Food Programme) on 2 and 3 May, blasting the Ayeyarwady delta and the capital, Yangon. The population of the declared disaster areas – much of it the country’s granary – is about 13 million. About 1.5 million have been seriously affected. In many places houses, farming assets and ...”

“... when I was first irritated by that children’s rhyme, which is wrong twice over. Oil painting may well be hard but in some ways it’s easier than painting in watercolour, and watercolours are often more beautiful. However, the prejudice the rhyme encapsulates does arise from real differences. A typical oil painting is an object, a substantial piece of ...”

“... se bene gesserint [during good conduct] … but upon the address of both Houses of Parliament it may be lawful to remove them’. (The Latin qualification was taken without acknowledgment from the ordinance by which the Long Parliament in 1648 had begun making judicial appointments.) It is generally accepted that the two limbs form a single condition ...”

“... became intense. By 1850 Britton could report that ‘since the commencement of this century, it may be asserted that more has been written and published on the life … of Shakspere, than during the whole of the preceding period between the acting of his first drama and the year 1800.’ Katherine Duncan-Jones, in her brilliant, scholarly and concise ...”

“... And so to Ernest Hemingway, whose adventures recorded by the military historian Nicholas Reynolds may not admit such subtlety. Reynolds is a former curator of the CIA Museum in Washington. Reasonably, the museum is a bit cagey and I am not very familiar with it but, one way and another, the collection has received quite a boost of late. In Hemingway’s ...”

“... Wei is not going to tell us, but he invites us to think that the answer to our question may lie neither in probable history nor in fantasy but in absurdist philosophy or certain modes of detective fiction.The film opens with a quotation in French from Camus’s play Caligula: ‘We don’t understand destiny and that is why I became destiny. I ...”

“... do on the cinema. It’s Disney we should be worried for. To those who argue that all this is as may be but the vast majority of these books are about small wizards staying up past their bedtime or the love affairs of ex-glamour models, one can only say: that’s true. Still, 115,000 different titles are published in Britain each year and – if you leave ...”

“... Chief Justice Kenyon said in relation to such a claim: ‘I do not mean to say that a stranger may not in any case prefer this sort of application; but he ought to come to the court with a very fair case in his hands.’ In 1835 the presiding judge of the Court of Exchequer added: ‘It has been the practice, which I hope never will be discontinued, for ...”

“... is a history of rule over the people rather than by the people. Representative democracy may not be government by the people either, but at least it aspires to be government for the people. It has become the ubiquitous expression of the modern democratic impetus. Sovereignty is pivotal in the attempt to reconcile democracy and representation. It too ...”

“... Mona except in terms of its late revelations, and these revelations are savage. The setting may be the insipid festival circuit of contemporary world literature, but the novel’s real subject is trauma and amnesia. Throughout, there are nervous tics, surges and refusals of memory. The book opens with Mona waking up from a blackout on a train ...”

“... court should refuse to entertain such a case and say it’s not constitutional business; but that may often be to leave standing an objectionable statute or an erroneous decision of a lower court. Instead, the US Supreme Court hangs its preferred solution on whatever constitutional peg it can find or devise. It was by this process, in the unsurprising absence ...”

“... Empires may rise and fall; Liberty and Slavery succeed alternately; Ignorance and Knowledge give place to each other; but the Cherry-tree will still remain in the Woods of Greece, Spain and Italy, and will never be affected by the Revolutions of Human Society.’ Hume may have been a bit too confident: in Eastern Europe the Revolutions of Human Society have been threatening even the cherry trees for years ...”

“... second instalment sets him off on what turns out to be an equally frustrated pursuit of power. It may seem curious that we are being asked to regard a man of such dazzling achievement as repeatedly failing in his aims, and at this stage we can only speculate about what he will be pursuing and not catching up with in Volume III. However that ...”