“... and beside himself with anxiety about how to look after his six remaining children and his in-laws. How he didn’t buckle under the weight of his circumstances, how he remained unbroken by such pain and loss, how, despite it all, he kept writing, would seem almost a miracle of fortitude were it not for the suspicion that his creative life required him to ...”

“... regime in which black and brown bodies could be seized, broken and destroyed outside all norms and laws of war – are coming to grips with ‘America’s Original Sin: Slavery and the Legacy of White Supremacy’ (an unlikely recent headline in Foreign Affairs). Back in the early 2000s the liberal universalists seemed unaware that their project might be ...”

“... by Tom Wolfe); called on a generation to abandon conventional striving, was casual about drug laws, went to Mexico, went to jail, and went back to the land in Oregon. In time he picked up writing again, but the old fire was extinct. Stone and Kesey, although close friends, were completely different writers. Stone sought clarity and precision, Kesey strove ...”

“... of her first novel behind her, Bedford got a contract to write an entire book about the trial of John Bodkin Adams – the Harold Shipman of his time – at the Old Bailey that year. The book begins with the judge’s entrance, ‘trailing a wake of subtlety, of secret powers, age’ and ends three and a half weeks later with the not guilty verdict. In ...”

“... behaviourist tradition that came to dominate American psychology in the 20th century, pioneered by John B. Watson after the First World War and later identified with B.F. Skinner, was established with the explicit aim of rendering human responses predictable and thereby controllable. Psychology would abandon any theory of mind in favour of data on observable ...”

“... Thiel dreams of immortality. Many tech billionaires do not believe they should be bound by the laws of nations or biology, and apparently want to continue consuming an outsize amount of the world’s resources indefinitely. ‘I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every ...”

“... them of encouraging it. That year, under the leadership of the anti-Semitic former neo-Nazi John Tyndall, the Front launched a racist campaign aimed at schoolchildren called How to Spot a Red Teacher: ‘You can recognise them when they sneer at our White race and nation and everything that has made Britain great.’ In view of Ukip’s insistence that ...”

“... which were harming Americans’ lungs and disfiguring their cities. Americans dislike restrictive laws and love markets. The upshot was an ingenious scheme of emission trading, within the US only, modelled on the system of ‘air rights’ in New York and other big cities, whereby the owners of low-rise buildings can sell the unoccupied space overhead to ...”

“... Harper.The relationship began to break down in the 1990s. In 1992 Ken Clarke, home secretary under John Major, announced an ambitious plan to reform policing. He described the police to Harper as ‘the last great unreformed Victorian public service’: excessively bureaucratic (the Met most of all, with five senior ranks of officer rather than the usual ...”

“... would have come out just fine. But only a few adventurous souls, and only one reputable economist, John Maynard Keynes, dared to contradict what seemed to be common sense, and even they were hesitant. The central bankers, by contrast, were utterly certain that they were right, just as they are now; and they gave exactly the same advice they are giving now; the ...”

“... person who would finally bring the thing to an end, one who wanted to talk solely about rights and laws. She wanted to break with old arguments in pursuit not only of peace but of order. ‘I used to joke with her,’ O’Hagan said, ‘that she would one day be President of a new Ireland.’ She took down some of the photographs and showed them to me. I noted ...”

“... Slater and Maya Slater, prompts us to ask again: ‘What is Tourguéneffish?’ Edmund Wilson, John Bayley and others have made the point that Turgenev in the original is more ‘textured’, modulated and idiomatic (‘He is interested in words,’ Wilson wrote, ‘in a way that the other great 19th-century Russian novelists – with the exception of ...”

“... beforehand.There was a different balance between writer and publisher at that time. There were no laws of copyright, and you sold your book outright for a single payment. In exceptional circumstances, if the book did extraordinarily well, the publisher might give you another chunk of money out of the goodness of his heart. In December 1856, Michel Lévy had ...”

“... nature is as much a political metaphor, an instrument for national contestation, as it is for John Clare and Ted Hughes. Critics such as Tom Paulin and Mina Gorji have drawn our attention to the ways in which nature becomes a metaphor for an embattled Englishness in Clare and Hughes; the unfinished ‘naturalness’ of nature is conflated with the ...”

“... Andrewes, for example, he can break in on his own prose and say, ‘I was writing last week on John Dos Passos,’ and then go on to make a comparison between the two authors’ respective forms of revulsion from industrial society. Describing himself as ‘a concision fetishist’, Wilson recommended that the literary journalist should steer a path ...”