“... at Ragoleti, and get him to hand over the three onze and twelve sacks of grain owing to me from May up to the present.’ But Jeli corrects him: ‘No, it’s only two and a quarter, because you left the cows over a month ago, and you mustn’t steal from the hand that feeds you.’ ‘That’s true!’ his father agrees, and promptly dies. This is a scene ...”

“... law’. This very trope currently forms the moral cement of the American Right. There may or may not be a suggestive and contradictory connection between ‘Ravelstein’s’ secretive sex life and his attachment to arcane doctrines – between the erotic and the esoteric – but Bellow can’t seem to be ...”

“... Mist. Readers who find the foregoing facts a bit irregular – that’s to say, untypical – may never have had the pleasure of Fred and Judy Vermorel’s excellent Starlust: The Secret Life of Fans, a book which has no trouble persuading you that the desires and preoccupations of fans are the most beautiful and worrying things about modern pop. Here’s ...”

“... every Indian pollster forecast another BJP triumph before the election results were announced in May. Few believed that the Italian-born head of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty could lead the Congress-dominated alliance to victory. In the 1990s, threatened by a possible challenge from Mario Cuomo, the governor of New York, Bill Clinton declared that the American ...”

“... is no extenuation. Neither is the plea that violence and privation, the sacrifice of the present, may be the price of breaking through to a better future. George Kline dismissed this in The Trotsky Reappraisal (1992) as ‘the fallacy of historically deferred value . . . a moral monstrosity’. Monstrous or not, it’s a bargain with the future which, as ...”

“... right." The 48 pages of ‘Oblivion’ have been a dream. The narrator’s perspective, which we may have found insufferable, repetitive, pompous or even momentarily criminal, isn’t the husband’s at all. Although we might be tempted to suppose that the dream has been his (after all, we’ve believed we were hearing his voice all along), an unhurried ...”

“... Wordsworth’s hopes and criticisms, on the other hand, are brought sympathetically to light. She may have been her husband’s amanuensis, but she was not an uncritical one, and had a keen eye – or rather, ear – for his dwindling poetic ambitions. In particular, she was privately dismissive of his mid-life addiction to the making of sonnets ...”

“... the marriage was far from lacking in love. There were times when Hetta’s exercise of her freedom may have caused Empson some pain; he missed her badly when she went off to Hong Kong for a year with a lover, and seems to have been a little unhappy when she added illegitimately to the family (possibly, as Haffenden suggests, more because of his sense of ...”

“... streets named after Churchill (more than 150 in Australia, only one in Cornwall). And many readers may find three chapters on Australia and New Zealand more than they need, especially when the complex reactions to him in France and Germany are covered in one broad-brush chapter on ‘Churchill and the Europeans’. The book is invaluable nonetheless, as the ...”

“... to escape the ‘monologic’ perspective of the ideology or set of opinions or beliefs the author may have held in real life. With Oe, too, it might be preferable to dissociate the author from ideas he merely seems to endorse (I will touch on the ‘sacrificial’ and on religion itself later on); and where the Naturalists might have offered us a ...”

“... would have led. As it was, the 1830s would see O’Connell in alliance with the Whigs, a link that may have moderated his course as effectively as Parnell’s combination with the Gladstonian Liberals between 1886 and 1890. The failure of the next great popular movement, to ‘repeal’ the Union, and the rise of romantic nationalism in the Young Ireland ...”

“... precise verses of yearning and revelation that he published in slim volumes. He was 34 when, in May 1914, he stood up to speak at the Zurichsee Doctors’ Society. Everyone was looking in the wrong place, he said. The cause of the conditions was not a germ or genetic defect, but something missing. Not an agent, but an absence.Touch​ your neck, just above ...”

“... policy efforts to marketise by design.The second story about universities is the one that may be more familiar to those who have looked on from a distance. Across the Western world in the 1960s, campuses were crucibles of politicisation and left-wing organisation, shaping the ‘new social movements’ that followed in subsequent decades. But a ...”

“... and beaten in the process. (The events at Columbia helped to inspire the uprisings in France in May 1968.) Early in June, Kennedy, whose ability to tap into the civil rights movement might have enabled him to translate anti-war activism into electoral appeal, was assassinated by a Palestinian man who claimed he had acted out of anger at Kennedy’s support ...”

“... of all the ministers of death’, and its preferred targets were children. In the past, you may have had something like a one in three chance of getting the disease and, if you did get it, a one in five chance of dying, though some outbreaks killed 50 per cent of the afflicted. Now smallpox is no more. In 1980, the World Health Organisation declared it ...”