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“... aberration, England’s sole experience of open military rule since the Conquest. Their powers, David Hume ruled, were exercised ‘not in the legal manner of European nations, but according to the maxims of eastern tyranny’. Nineteenth-century Whiggish historians queued to condemn that ‘despotism’. That the sword reigned in Cromwellian England is ...”

“... We could start by wondering what ‘it’ was, before we even get to asking what ‘really’ means. And then there is Nietzsche’s remark that became a mantra in the days of deconstruction: ‘There are no facts, only interpretations.’ That seems pretty final, and designed to lead us badly astray. But Nietzsche turns out to be up to something more ...”

“... doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty – that weird English scrap of parchment – in effect means parliamentary absolutism, a hasty 1689 transfer from the divine right of kings. We don’t have ‘inalienable rights’, but are allowed to vote and speak freely only because the government, through Parliament, generously lends some of its power to its ...”

“... home and meet the world.’ But to rehearse a good play with a company of good actors (and that means intelligent, witty, energetic and entertaining people) is to experience the rare phenomenon of being part of a successful social group sharing common aims, mutual respect and pleasure in each other’s company. It is a paradigm, rarely achieved outside ...”

“... about. But it was no fun losing all of the battles, and I am still trying to work out what it means that we should so thoroughly have lost all of them. What can we do about it? Let me put the matter as starkly as I can. If we can’t speak the language of our enemies, not only will they not listen to us – they might not listen to us anyway – but they ...”

“... be news to mothers, nurses and prostitutes, but the massive swelling of the service economy means that emotional availability can no longer be dismissed as women’s work; it must be seen as a dominant commodity form under late capitalism. And it has to be real. ‘The authenticity of being happy is important,’ a Pret manager tells the ...”

“... from 70 years because he named the policemen he had been paying off. We know what ‘true story’ means in such instances: the basic facts are given but they are coloured and tilted by the rules of genre and the star system, which is to say by a shift into the realm of glamour and romance. But Scott wants to have it both ways, to give us both grim facts and ...”

“... only a couple of weeks ago and giving entirely good reasons why Gordon Brown was on top and David Cameron on the ropes now look faintly embarrassing. But at the beginning of October Brown was on top and no one can be faulted for failing to see his impending humiliation. Nor could they have predicted that the abandonment of a premature general election ...”

“... tempted to pick up on this suggestion because it recalls one of the greatest of all horror movies, David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979), where so-called anger therapy results not only in a welcome release of psychic aggression but in teams of little people smashing in the heads of the people the patient doesn’t like. The real interest of Let the Right One ...”

“... personal essays, not far from the work of the so-called ‘ultra-talk’ poets (Albert Goldbarth, David Kirby) whose chatty, digressive work filled many magazines in the 1990s. Perillo told me at a recent reading that her favourite contemporary poet was C.K. Williams, whose famously long-lined, sometimes violent poems were as committed as she is to ...”

“... Histoire naturelle rubs up against vitriolic anti-Franco cartoons; Cranach the Elder’s David and Bathsheba is subject to a fierce analytic glare. Throughout, Picasso’s lovers, friends and forebears drift in and out (Vollard, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, Jacqueline Roque, Manet, Rembrandt), taking one role then another in an endless play of ...”

“... progressing across a desert. But that’s confusing: higher levels of social mobility may be a means to faster growth, but mobility and prosperity are best kept distinct.There are deeper disagreements over how to understand and measure the ‘social positions’ that people are – or aren’t – moving between. All mobility research is interested in the ...”

“... existence or dream, perceived anywhere remotely toward its true dimension.’ How then, given the means and possibilities of his assignment, does he hope to convey a truth of life in its physical and spiritual dimensions? The method is sometimes ostensive, close to a recitation of a catechism, simply asking, for example, ‘how it can be that a stone, a ...”

“... Given how busy he was, it would have taken some special prescience to think of this as his means of winning over the public, especially since many of them had little idea of what Twitter was even when he left office three years later. ‘During my time as an MP,’ he writes, ‘I never mastered the capacity to leave a good impression or sculpt my ...”

“... of life now reigns in the thinking stratum of Chinese society, especially among the young. David Rice’s Dragon’s Brood is a marvellously fresh and immediate evocation of this confusion at what one might call the first level of perception – that of the serious visit. Rice is innocent of any real knowledge of Chinese culture or Chinese history, and ...”