“... preaching good news to the poor, proclaiming release to the captive, testifying, as With great power the apostles gave witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus (Acts 4.33). I was also interested in restoring sight to the blind (Luke 4.19), casting out demons (Luke 9.1), cleansing lepers (Matthew 8.1-4), feeding thousands (Luke 9.10-17) and raising the ...”

“... at the start of the 20th century, it created the modern economy, made the US a world economic power and fired up the Populists, who excoriated the fiendish ‘“devil fish” sucking away the lifeblood of the country’s agrarian heartland’. As his story develops, Fraser’s deeper purpose reveals itself: this is not simply an engaging cultural tour ...”

“... cast the United States as uniquely virtuous’, but having Trump in the ‘cockpit of American power’ will reveal ‘just how terrifyingly normal a nation we are, with our populist jingoism and hawkish foreign policy’. The bipartisan support for the president’s bombing campaigns shows that little has changed in this respect, however. As Trump ordered ...”

“... of its own arse to start talking about Northern Ireland. 19 July. Watch two good programmes about Henry Moore, one of whose works, a Reclining Figure bought for the city, could still raise a storm of protest in Leeds as late as 1951. Now of course the city is home to the Henry Moore Institute. Moore has no trace, even early ...”

“... the unknown. But the dreadful machinery of retribution proceeded essentially from on high. ‘The power of the human imagination to build up a stereotype’ was exploited and channelled by ‘the authorities, notably the magistrates’. Doubt and scepticism were dispelled, until everyone felt the presence of the devil on the doorstep each day, just waiting ...”

“... and puff through many ‘take thats’ the world around them gets wiped out. As the struggle for power and territory continues in Beirut, very little will be left of either when, and if, a final victor emerges. A close friend of mine who has lived through the entire ordeal told me last week over the phone from Beirut that quite apart from the bombing and ...”

“... it asked us to recognise how imperfection, awkwardness, even vulgarity could deepen the expressive power of a work far beyond the range of tastefulness and a suave technique. Now, in an essay entitled ‘Full-Grown Infants’, Bayley returns again to these earlier perceptions and develops them further, pointing out how, in the opening lines of ‘Ode on ...”

“... You could blame the Chinese, as many Chinese themselves did. ‘If your people are virtuous,’ Henry Pottinger, the most unbending of Britain’s agents in China, claimed, ‘they will desist from the evil practice; and if your officers are incorruptible, and obey their orders, no opium can enter your country. The discouragement of the growth of the poppy ...”

“... for Limehouse and, in effect, campaign manager for the Stepney Labour Party in its bid to win power in the borough elections. The local fixer, Oscar Tobin, had made a fine assessment of Attlee’s qualifications: ‘He was neither Irish nor Jewish, but respected by both; he was ILP but not a pacifist; he had an excellent war record, an East End record of ...”

“... the historian’s purpose in going home is to recover something left there, some knowledge or power or psychic condition which, brought back to the present, can help us all to feel more at home in this strange place. Nostalgic historians may be classified according to the times and places in which they locate their homes. Some, like ...”

“... necessarily involved negotiated compromises: because it needed legitimacy, it had to possess a power not primarily coercive but consensual. To sustain hegemonic authority, the law had to be (more or less) accepted by the man in the street – anyone likely to be robbed or mugged and any potential juryman. After all, nobodies as well as nobs had their stuff ...”

“... one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is part of an Englishman’s constitution.’ Henry Crawford’s comment in Mansfield Park is a reminder that ‘Shakespeare’ is more than an individual writer: ‘it’ is an institution, a body of texts whose study, from O-level to the highest reaches of academia, is a means of legitimating social ...”

“... from it. It is in any case very European, and has no American equivalent, even where writers like Henry James have thought it desirable to produce one. This peculiar ‘death of the subject’ may account for some of the fascination Benjamin has had for several generations of left intellectuals, by lending the interests and commitments of the absent subject a ...”

“... by constitutional precedent and advised by peers, but to be of any use as a focus of effective power he or she had to wield sufficient personal prerogative to choose his or her own agents, without whom the increasingly complex and centralised business of the state could not be carried out. Equally, for the monarch to stand a chance of behaving like one ...”

“... history – people like the educationalist David Hare, the Anglo-Portuguese poet and teacher Henry Derozio, the great Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt. If Kipling had been born fifty years earlier, it would have been impossible for him to write the cheerfully assonantal but bleak lines: ‘O East is East, and West is West/And never the twain shall ...”