“... until the century’s second great catastrophe. This is not the common view. The title alone of Paul Fussell’s enormously influential The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), for example, proclaims the contrary. So does the concluding line – ‘Never such innocence again’ – of Philip Larkin’s 1960 poem ‘MCMXIV’, invoking the summer haze, the ...”

“... Can it really be the case, for instance, that the daughter of an Irish diplomat who worked for De Valera, the teenager who was fascinated (as Object Lessons tells us) with rebel songs and martyred patriots, did not ‘talk to’ anyone about the Famine until she went, as a student, to Achill? And how true is it to say that, in turning away from the old ...”

“... thought about this for some time but my thoughts were focused when I saw Isabelle Huppert in Paul Verhoeven’s 2016 film, Elle. The film begins with a rape about which the victim, Huppert, is ambivalent. This sent the critics, particularly male critics, scuttling to and fro wondering whether it was a feminist, post-feminist or anti-feminist film, or ...”

“... told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a rigid censorship to prevent anything like that ever happening again. This is presumably the origin of Larkin’s remark that before he died he fully expected to ...”

“... sous l’oeil des Russes,’ he wrote. His own option for the second term – he was an admirer of De Maistre and Donoso Cortes – was never in doubt. In England, where Schmitt’s incandescent early manifesto for the Roman Church was edited in a Catholic series of Essays in Order, polarities were not so acute. The Cambridge of the Twenties was a sheltered ...”

“... of a Daughter-in-Law’, ‘Grandmothers’. If we are allowed ‘Trying to talk with a man’, everything vehement, and lesbian, from the poet’s last decade has been suppressed. All this matters because compilation is expensive when there are royalties to pay. Volumes like the Faber Book can’t appear often, and those that establish themselves ...”

“... the plantocracy in Saint-Domingue, James wrote a play celebrating him as an anti-colonial hero (Paul Robeson took the lead role: he had admired Louverture since he was a teenager). In 1998, Toussaint’s remains were interred at the Panthéon: he was commemorated as a ‘freedom fighter, architect of the abolition of slavery and Haitian hero’, although he ...”

“... stick. One of my earliest memories of Brixton Prison is being woken one evening by the sounds of a man crying in the yard. Climbing up to the bars of my cell in A ‘Seg’, I looked down to see a grey-haired prisoner, obviously blind or with seriously impaired sight, being escorted to the hospital wing. The two prison officers with him were entertaining ...”

“... were more restrained, looking like European art-house fiction. Congress featured a drawing by Paul Klee. The boy wasn’t fooled: the crazy titles of the two books with ‘tasteful’ covers were enticing enough.‘Will you buy me these?’His grandmother scowled. It was not enough that the boy be bookish: he should be the right kind of bookish. ‘All ...”

“... have had pride of place. For a careful and balanced account of them, there is no finer study than Paul Ginsborg’s Italy and Its Discontents, the work of an English historian in Florence, originally published in Italian, the latest monument to critical admiration of the country by a foreign scholar. Long-standing occupation of office has not been peculiar to ...”

“... stresses the personifications as well as the strangeness of the form.’Hegel himself, being a man of his time and place in this way as in so many others so much less attractive, was a huge fan of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister novels, which tell of a young burgher’s adventures among theatre folk, ruined castles, secret societies, as he seeks to find himself ...”

“... generous offer at Camp David would have given them only a disarmed set of Bantustans under de facto Israeli control. The tragic history of the Jewish people does not obligate the US to help Israel today no matter what it does. Israel’s backers also portray it as a country that has sought peace at every turn and shown great restraint even when ...”

“... to become the unwitting subjects of medical observation in the notorious Tuskegee experiment; Paul Goodman’s Of One Blood (the phrase is from Acts 17.26), about the abolitionist response to St Paul’s pronouncement that the whole human race has a common origin; Barbara Ehrenreich’s Blood Rites, about the origins of ...”

“... that the two opinions are far from mutually exclusive. And there is more: love poems written man to man, of which even the heartbreakingly sane and justly famous ‘To His Love’ can be distanced into possible heterosexuality only by jiggering about with the ‘his’ in its title; a sometimes obsessional liking for ...”

“... could build to more sustained recognitions; as in the intense rendering of the plain faces of a man and a woman: The young man’s eyes had the opal lightings of dark oil and, though he was watching me in a way that relaxed me to cold weakness and ignobility, they fed too strongly inward to draw to a focus: whereas those ...”