“... sentences of Stendhal, and in the plays of Pirandello. If he was drawn so greatly to Proust this may have been for technical rather than temperamental reasons, for he was not, by all accounts, a Proust-like man: but the awesome elaboration of Proust’s style, and the effortless precision of his mind, offered an ultimate test of the examinee’s powers. We ...”

“... nominally fictive quatrain poems lies in the desired diminishment of import. Sweeney’s meaning may be lost, but he still works as a symbol, evoking a sense of threat proportionately massive. Anna, on the other hand, is only a dislocated allusion, a sad verbal gesture, the detritus of a genre retained like any other haunting objet trouvé for its ironic ...”

“... and Gloucester see something where there is nothing’. On page 80, Troilus and Cressida ‘may well be the first play of Shakespeare’s in which the Jonsonian method was deliberately tried out’. But on page 96, it is ‘too early to have been influenced by Jonson’s major new-style plays’. Bayley adopts one view of the chronological relationship ...”

“... an American private wrote in his diary, ‘we cannot distinguish between a Bolo and a native; they may all be Bolos as much as we know.’The Western participants’ sense of the futility of the intervention is echoed in the last paragraph of A Nasty Little War. But no book dealing with war on Ukrainian territory and published in 2023 could avoid mentioning ...”

“... he was related to many of them. Antony’s speech at Caesar’s funeral on 20 March, though we may think we know it from Shakespeare, is neither preserved verbatim nor reliably recorded in the hostile and conflicting evidence that has survived, but it was clearly a tour de force, in which he laid claim to leadership of the Caesarian party. Thanks to ...”

“... to which Gandhi would go to pander to Muslims.When Savarkar was released from the Andamans, in May 1921, he had to make up for lost time. His decade in exile had cost him the chance of inheriting the position of pre-eminent Hindu leader in the national movement from his hero, Bal Gangadhar Tilak. That position now belonged to Gandhi. Essentials of Hindutva ...”

“... that an apocalyptic answer to the question just posed is wrong. The pedestrians on their iPhones may look like isolate, properly subservient individuals, carrying their commodity world with them, locked into TikTok immediacy. But they aren’t there yet. The spectacle is always hybrid, partly embroiled in the past – society lives on in it, feeding it ...”

“... surprising that oil-based monomaterialist theories of modernity prevail. But transition theory may not have become so dominant had it not been for the advent of the ‘nuclear age’. The promise of nuclear power was great. Many thought it had the potential to replace all other energy sources and thus to bring about a true energy transition. However, the ...”

“... book relates the British response to the hostage crisis, culminating in the SAS’s assault on 5 May. Macintyre writes that the story of the siege was ‘presented afterwards as a straightforward morality tale of military daring, civilian bravery, patient police work and wicked foreign terrorists bent on mayhem’. In reality, as he says, the events were ...”

“... have been tracked to within a centimetre, moment by moment for decades.Given all this data, we may ask: are there any hints that a tiny primordial black hole, with a mass within the prescribed range for dark matter, has flown through the inner solar system? A flyby from a microscopic primordial black hole would set visible objects wobbling, just a tiny bit ...”

“... accounting for between 60 and 65 per cent of the peninsula’s urban population. While they may have converted out of fear for their lives, many New Christians were eager to integrate into mainstream Christian society. They joined religious orders, sponsored family chapels in churches and cathedrals, and married Old Christians. Some sought additional ...”

“... more baroque in their transliteration – ‘edificaeshun’, ‘reckreashun’ – and there may be other meanings at play. In 2002, with the release of Mi Revalueshanary Fren, Johnson became the second living poet (after Czesław Miłosz) to be published by Penguin Classics. His work is taught in schools and studied at universities. Even so, it can ...”

“... with the assistance of no less than three researchers: ‘Some members of the wartime community may feel we might have made our consultation more extensive; we have confined it to points on which we needed to supplement or clarify the evidence of the surviving archives.’ The trouble is that their account of operations is based on the now outdated Official ...”

“... probably skip the hermetic accounts of American football games, as earnest as Sportsnight. They may enjoy Reagan’s tales of his beginnings in radio, including the inadvertent signing-off of Aimée Semple McPherson, the evangelist, with a Mills Brothers record of ‘Minnie the Moocher’s Wedding Day’. And they’ll wince at his verdict on filming The ...”

“... he withstood the rising demand that he submit it to other experts for a thorough examination. In May 1859, however, the new Duke of Devonshire, to whose late father Collier had given it, acceded to the request of Sir Frederic Madden, the Keeper of Manuscripts in the British Museum, that it be lent to him for inspection. The controversial volume thus was ...”