“... was a class traitor Shakespeare hated the mob Donne sold out a bit later Sidney was a nob. Stephen Greenblatt, living proof that one may share Eagleton’s scepticism towards the institutions of established power but still relish the nuances of literary texts as Bayley does, would doubtless see the election as yet another example of how authority ...”

“... really understand it, and that its founder said what he plainly did say? The political theorist Stephen Holmes gives an interesting possible answer for the analogous case of anti-liberal political thought. At first, extreme claims are made, but under challenge there is a retreat to watered-down versions so ordinary that they can not be objected to. This ...”

“... are encompassed by the allegations he raises – it is not just a matter of Peter Mandelson but of Bernard Donoghue, Gordon Brown, Helen Liddell, Alistair Campbell and Charlie Whelan. Stephen Byers and Robinson are currently trying to prevent the sale of Bower’s book, but one would like to hear how others mentioned here ...”

“... is essential. Occupation had always been her standby as it had been that of her father, Leslie Stephen. And words provided it. But if the words of the Diary prove one thing it is that, for a creative artist, they were no substitute for introspection. Turning back a volume or two we come to the dinner party in January 1930 with the Harrises. Bogey Harris ...”

“... writes. Once he was in his late teens, it became fashionable to fall in love with Freud. When Stephen Spender, according to himself, told T.S. Eliot that he had succumbed, Eliot said: ‘There’s nothing I understand more.’ Spender and Freud spent some time in a cottage in Wales when Freud was 18 and produced a little book of drawings and poems ...”

“... like JINSA or WINEP, and who included Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Bernard Lewis, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, had little trouble persuading the Clinton administration to adopt the general goal of ousting Saddam. But they were unable to sell a war to achieve that objective. They were no more able to ...”

“... terms just don’t apply. ‘Like Einstein I am not happy and do not want to be happy,’ wrote Bernard Shaw, and he would be endorsed by entire noble or foolish armies of martyrs to duty, vocation, the Life Force, passion or pathological compulsion. Indeed, Mr Singer might have come closer to psychological reality had he, sooner than questionably quoting ...”

“... to the European spectator. Powell’s slide-shows in the Security Council are no substitute for Bernard-Henri Lévy or Michael Ignatieff vibrating at the microphone. For lack of visual aids, the deliverance of Baghdad leaves European imagination cold. Third, and perhaps most important, there is fear. Aerial retribution could be wreaked on Yugoslavia in ...”

“... This was a clause in the Punishment of Death Bill introduced by the lawyer MPs Fitzroy Kelly, Stephen Lushington and Thomas Talfourd (a friend of Lamb and Dickens), which aimed to remove the death penalty in all cases except treason and murder. Bryant notes this quietly, but seems unaware of Upchurch’s second book, Beyond the Law: The Politics of Ending ...”

“... with tutorial concern for the young. There were dons who coached the boat, such as Leslie Stephen. There was a college such as King’s, for centuries an Etonian preserve, where the young fellows had known the undergraduates when they were both together in College at Eton and treated them therefore as equals; Bradshaw, a formidable scholar, was at ...”

“... and reluctantly, the articles of impeachment against Nixon. Her boss at the time had been Bernard Nussbaum, one of many ambitious attorneys to get a head start from that investigation. Mr Nussbaum had just been forced to resign as White House counsel, for his apparent role in muddying the inquiry into the death of Vince Foster. Thus, while a ...”

“... Zero in 1972). Ten of the pieces these two books collect have already appeared in English in Stephen Heath’s valuable selection Image-Music-Text, and three are also to be found in Sontag’s anthology. An editor’s note to The Responsibility of Forms manages to miscount these previously translated items, and to turn Heath’s text into a test. It also ...”

“... full of striking black and white images of their strange, patient faces – ‘Donatello-like’, Bernard O’Donoghue once said – the beauty of which Glob celebrated in what was in the English version slightly fruity prose: ‘Majesty and gentleness still stamp his features as they did when he was alive,’ he says of the Tollund Man. Their state of ...”

“... of his ability to steer the bargain through Congress. The legislative triumph went instead to Stephen Douglas, a politician from Illinois who, though four years younger than Lincoln, had already gained the national prominence he craved. In 1854, as the government debated the admission of Nebraska, Douglas persuaded Congress to abandon the Missouri line in ...”

“... for years – it’s an alternative career. The dogs I had to step over to go down the ramp to Bernard Tschumi’s statement glass and concrete box, the New Acropolis Museum, were crushed and posthumous, unwilling to lift their heads from the slick floor with its spindly reflections of cypress trees. They wore blue collars, they were tagged collaborators ...”