“... England’ received the very epitome of grave, tasteful and well-regarded biography. John Gore chronicled the inner man, his tastes, hobbies and friendships; and Harold Nicolson described his public life and times. Nicolson’s book in particular did as much to confirm George’s reputation as a good king as it did to confirm his own reputation ...”

“... he doth smite you under the first rib.’ The pamphlet bears the influence of the Leveller leader John Lilburne, a recurring figure in Como’s radical coalition and the subject of Michael Braddick’s commanding and enlivening new biography. Lilburne fought courageously for Parliament as the nation’s defender against tyranny, but turned his eloquence and ...”

“... the country in search of old records that a handful of them – Skip James, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt – were ‘rediscovered’. They became draws on the coffee-house and festival circuit, while recordings by John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, who had made their names playing house-rocking, amplified ...”

“... of these critics, but the realisation that writers like Conrad and Kipling, or Jane Austen and John Stuart Mill, thought and wrote without the natives in mind as an audience. An Indian or Jamaican woman reading Kim or Jane Eyre was able to bring to light the usually unstated colonial and male-dominated ideological assumptions behind the form of the novel ...”

“... wounded supporters (including Booth in The Poet’s Plight) are still contending against them. John Osborne (director of American Studies at Hull) attempted to refute those denigrating Larkin on ideological grounds in his 2008 Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence; his new book, Radical Larkin, fortified with literary theory, wishes to reclaim Larkin as a ...”

“... Protestantism that had made too many compromises with the modern world. More than a decade later John Gray, disillusioned with Thatcherism, proposed post-liberalism as a new path; more important, the English Anglican (leaning heavily Anglo-Catholic) John Milbank radicalised the theological project, breaking with liberal ...”

“... Increasingly, policing in Xinjiang has an algorithmic basis. A superb piece of reporting by Christian Shepherd in the Financial Times recently told the story of Yalqun Rozi, who has ended up in a re-education camp for publishing Uighur textbooks in an attempt to preserve the language. One of his crimes was using too high a percentage of Uighur ...”

“... than Swift, in fact – to justify hatred, he went back to the early church. In ‘Ribh Considers Christian Love Insufficient’ (1934), the ‘old hermit’ of the title shuns love as an incomprehensible gift from God and declares: ‘I study hatred.’ Because it scours the soul, hatred now has entirely the opposite properties of those associated with it in ...”

“... defender of a view that, in its logical structure and basic values, adheres to the tradition of John Stuart Mill. Raz believes that liberal institutions are justified because, for those civilisations capable of sustaining them, they provide the best way of promoting human well-being: their value, in other words, is instrumental. The argument depends both on ...”

“... poetry; had been anointed as the diabolic successor to Aleister Crowley; had nearly interested John Betjeman in socialism and A.J.P. Taylor in incense. But he was one of those modernists who could only have been formed by an observance of tradition: he needed an anchor as much as he wanted a sailor. I only knew him at the fag-end of his career, when the ...”

“... of a story in the first-ever children’s periodical, the Lilliputian Magazine, brought out by John Newbery in 1751, and with its theme of character-moulding (a silly little girl is cured of vanity through suffering a fright) it set the tone for a good deal of juvenile magazine fiction for some time. Right up until the 1930s and Forties, characters in the ...”

“... him, rush to fill the vacuum that Disraeli’s half-self leaves open. Jewish without being Jewish; Christian and yet of the East, not the West; Conservative and yet not of the blood; a man, but with dark ringlets and foppish, half-formed male friends. These are the inversions, the gaps, that Disraeli exhibits and inhabits: a way of expressing the ...”

“... which in fact contradicts it, because late Picasso surely begins in 1964 (the starting-point of Christian Geelhaar’s pioneering show at Basle in 1981 of ‘Pablo Picasso. Das Spaetwerk’). And the exhibition is essentially one of paintings, drawings and prints of 1964-1972, prefaced by a selection of paintings and sculptures with a starting-point at the ...”

“... Barnsley, Edinburgh, the Best of British Authors campaign, the Best of Young British Authors, Christian Book Fortnight, the Spring Military Book Campaign, National Children’s Book Week, Map and Guide Month, Thriller Week ... And the Hungarian book trade is necessarily a great deal more centralised than the British. There are far fewer publishers – not ...”

“... imperialistic or infectious irony can be. Two notable warnings are not accommodated by Enright. John Crowe Ransom’s: ‘We should be so much in favour of tragedy and irony as not to think it good policy to require them in all our poems, for fear we might bring them into bad fame.’ And T.S. Eliot’s: ‘What we rebel against is neither the use of irony ...”