“... Since they also sing the praises of meekness as a political virtue, they are unlikely to prove Peter Mandelson’s favourite reading. Bobbio distinguishes four kinds of relation between ethics and politics. There are two brands of monism which respectively reduce ethics to politics (Hobbes) and politics to ethics (Erasmus, Kant); a more flexible form of ...”

“... that is both affectionate and scornful, runs like an underground current through his work. Henry James and Lenny Bruce are often taken to be Roth’s improbably paired patron saints, but it is possible to add Eleanor Roosevelt to the gallery – or at least Henry Wallace and Paul Robeson, whose names are murmured half-reverentially throughout Roth’s ...”

“... Party, a significant presence in the city’s unions and electoral politics. The Communists Peter Caccione and Benjamin Davis got the second and fourth highest number of votes in the city council elections of 1945, and the Communist-influenced American Labor Party elected Vito Marcantonio, perhaps the most left-wing member of Congress, to the House of ...”

“... unable to raise the revenue to pay the crews. After the Restoration in 1660, both Charles II and James II demonstrated enthusiasm and expertise in nurturing naval expansion. But the Royal Navy’s performance in the Second and Third Dutch Wars was uneven, and political and religious divisions among its officers and men enabled William III and the Dutch fleet ...”

“... it is an eirenic exploration, in which he never speaks unkindly of his rivals – for example, Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads – or of the dozen other new or newish books listed on Amazon that have ‘Silk Roads’ as part of their title; the topographical section of the London Library has a whole Silk Roads shelf. This is evidently an idea ...”

“... tenants. The Gregory clause was ‘a charter for land clearance and consolidation’, according to Peter Gray. ‘The substantial rise in evictions after 1847 was attributed largely to its introduction,’ according to Christine Kinealy. For the tenants whose potato crop had failed and whose families were starving, the Gregory clause was a nightmare. As a ...”

“... even Neville Chamberlain might have blushed. We learn this not from Blair’s memoirs, but from Peter Mandelson’s, which provide a much more complete account of the Blair/Brown relationship (they are also much easier to read, since Mandelson has no problem telling his story in chronological order).* Mandelson reveals that Blair frequently pledged to ‘do ...”

“... ones. The Professor’s House centres on the memories of an ageing historian, Napoleon Godfrey St Peter, and much of the book – the entire middle section, in fact – focuses on St Peter’s loving recollections of his former student Tom Outland, a prodigy and inventor who was killed in the First World War. The novel also ...”

“... of song. Many of her poems seem to ask to be set to music by Delius, Vaughan Williams, Finzi or Peter Warlock; especially those about peopled and unpeopled landscapes, the first cuckoo in Spring, faith gained or lost, and doves come flying. As if waiting for them to be set, she gives them a provisional music of her own, in keeping with the sentiment that we ...”

“... shows how the ‘carnivalesque’ was harnessed to official ideologies under Elizabeth and James I. Terence Hawkes, Francis Barker and Peter Hulme (AS), and Paul Brown (PS), link The Tempest with the ideology of colonisation, arguing that the play’s formal involutions reflect, not transcendent truths about illusion ...”

“... and Edward Fugion, did a thoroughly professional job in following the Irish revolutionary priest James O’Coigley and tracing his associates. In a delightfully libellous caricature by Isaac Cruikshank the runners were imagined not only as a formidable anti-radical force but as a force of nature. It shows Charles James Fox ...”

“... snobs and sports are by no means all boastful or complicit. The supreme text of recent years is James Fox’s account of Lord Lucan and his set, with their boffes de politesse. There is a touch of Lucanian zombiness in The Monument, and the peer himself takes part in The Passion of John Aspinall. Patrician insolence has quite often appeared to express a ...”

“... between Prufrock’s ‘overwhelming question’ (line 10) and the observation in Chapter 23 of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers that ‘The whole company were a good deal astounded with this overwhelming question’? Certainly Eliot’s mind was a vast, labyrinthine echo chamber, and perhaps more than any other canonical poet of the English ...”

“... and those under him were closely scrutinised for any tremulousness of the upper lip. James Murray, an eminent Scottish biologist who accompanied Fawcett’s 1911 expedition along the upper Heath River, was tested particularly harshly, being an interloper from the more showily dramatic – and better-funded – world of polar ...”

“... about Bathsua Makin, a noted 17th-century polyglot, says she was presented at the court of James I because of her ability to ‘speak and write pure Latin, Greek and Hebrew’. ‘But can she spin?’ the king asked. John Gallagher relates this story and many like it in Learning Languages in Early Modern England, in which he assembles a rich body of ...”