“... quango with laudable aims was not ‘a call to revolutionary change in Nigeria’ – some hope! – but just another cover for stealing money, and lots of it. Ken Wiwa is also coy about how his father made enough money, in an increasingly depressed economy, to send four children to top-notch public schools in England – as though there were no decent ...”

“... English by Shelley Frisch. (The first volume, covering Kafka’s youth, was written last in the hope that the papers in the Max Brod estate – a mysterious suitcase full of documents – would exit the apartment of the septuagenarian daughter of Max Brod’s presumed lover, but the destiny of those papers remains in legal dispute.) Part of what is so ...”

“... need. So the wealthy Edmund Waller, who wrote panegyrics to Oliver Cromwell and then praised Charles II, is given faintish praise as a refiner of English verse. During his exile in France, Waller lived ‘with great splendour and hospitality; and from time to time amused himself with poetry, in which he sometimes speaks of the rebels, and their ...”

“... Samuel Parr (‘the Whig Dr Johnson’), the great liberal advocate Thomas Erskine, R.B. Sheridan, Charles James Fox, the novelists and dramatists Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, Amelia Alderson, Mary Hays and Charlotte Smith, as well as Godwin’s publisher George Robinson and a number of dissenting ministers who, largely forgotten now, were important ...”

“... drafts of work in progress. The leading members of the group, which included the Anglican writer Charles Williams during the years of the Second World War, also seem to have shared a form of conservatism – one with Tory anarchist leanings – that was more cultural than political (and was the more conservative for seeing itself as apolitical). Tolkien and ...”

“... loomed over this mixed population. Readers enrolling on Sante’s guided tour should abandon hope at the gate if they’re expecting to go on to purgatory and paradise. For Sante hell is too invigorating to leave behind: murder, intoxication, libertinage, art and revolution are sublime forms of self-expression. At the head of this parade is the rogue ...”

“... sanitary wear and rags for cleaning. The German high-fashion industry continued nevertheless, the hope being that it would generate some national revenue to help finance the war. Luxurious feminine designs were created for export only, and glossy photos were published in German fashion magazines. Guenther shows us some of these ornate ensembles, which look ...”

“... them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.’ There might presumably have been some hope for Lewis had his eyes merely been those of a successful rapist. Lewis describes his visit to Pound’s Paris studio in the first of his two volumes of autobiography, Blasting and Bombardiering (1937). No one answered his knock, but the door was open, so he ...”

“... Ursprung of Haydn’s material, where its handling is so far from childish. Here he anticipates Charles Rosen’s Classical Style, which has always seemed to be a brilliant codification and tidying up of the rich overview implicit in Tovey’s sprawling oeuvre, in which extraordinary hints and insights are thrown out to left and right in the most hurried ...”

“... emotions; on others, he granted dogs, horses, monkeys and magpies a range of emotions, including hope, fear and joy, none of which, of course, required thought. The Cartesian animal-machine wasn’t just alive; it was also, in some versions, a sensible and a feeling thing. There were later Cartesians who enthusiastically dispensed with these nuances about ...”

“... Montaigne as an act of patronage. In 1573 he became an ‘ordinary gentleman of the chamber’ of Charles IX, an honorary post without pay or duties. In 1577 he received an analogous courtesy appointment from Henry of Navarre, the Huguenot leader who would become Henry IV of France. Montaigne was proud of these honours. The title page of his 1580 edition of ...”

“... of an especially brutal form of slavery – wouldn’t submit to bondage again. The French general Charles Leclerc promised to subdue Saint-Domingue within two weeks, but nine months later he was dead, along with tens of thousands of his soldiers. In 1804, Haiti became the second republic in the New World and the first Black one. The second article of its ...”

“... phenomenon. He saw them as objects of quasi-religious longing, ‘technological angels’ offering hope of spiritual redemption in a secular, science-stunned age. In recent decades they’ve often been described in more menacing terms, but that hasn’t invalidated Jung’s central point: the way a society talks about UFOs provides insights into its deepest ...”

“... a member of the Royal Adventurers Company from 1663, and, from 1672 – when he was appointed by Charles II as the First Lord of Trade and Plantations – its successor body, the Royal Africa Company, a chartered organisation which attempted to gain a monopoly over the English slave trade.There are rivers still named Ashley and Cooper in the 1st earl’s ...”

“... first is the dream of the social-democratic equivalent of the philosopher-king. This expresses the hope that even in contemporary mass democracies a figure will emerge who can work the political machine and at the same time embody intellect, sensibility and liberal values, someone who can win power and then exercise it in the name of reason and ...”