“... is in contradiction to the political outlook of those who think they can rule the world by reading the runes of big data. The latter are globalists through and through, and convinced that the future is what they decide to make of it. But ideological affinity is often about form rather than content. The tragic aspect of Brexitism is that, like so many ...”

“... also included the artists Nigel Henderson, William Turnbull and Magda Cordell, the architects Peter and Alison Smithson, and the critic Reyner Banham. In the late 1980s the Smithsons looked back on the ‘as found’ aesthetic of New Brutalism as ‘a confronting recognition of what the postwar world actually was like’: ‘In a society that had nothing ...”

“... Schwarzkopf writes, ‘now that they knew of my fascination with their culture’. General Sir Peter de la Billière, Britain’s commander in the Gulf War, seems even more smitten with Arab ‘culture’2. ‘I liked and respected Arabs and understood their way of life,’ he announces. ‘I came to appreciate the Arabs well, to appreciate their fine ...”

“... and ‘stubborn’. Both groups then moved on to an ostensibly different task: reading a somewhat ambiguous story about a young man, whom they were then asked to evaluate. The first group thought much more highly of the young man than the second did, presumably because the positive words they had just memorised were more available to ...”

“... gone for some time.’ Roth’s titles have often teased with implied offers of frank confession: Reading Myself and Others. The Ghost Writer, ‘My True Story’, etc. In the preface to the last Peter Tarnopol solemnly announced that something truer than true was on its way: ‘Presently Mr Tarnopol is preparing to forsake ...”

“... the best succinct introduction to the poetry is Joseph Brodsky’s extraordinary close reading of one poem, ‘A New Year’s Greeting’, which appeared first in Russian and was then translated for his book of essays Less Than One (1986). Entitled with deceptive modesty ‘Footnote to a Poem’, this is an introduction not only to Tsvetaeva’s ...”

“... of Lisa. Thomas has said that, after he had envisaged the earlier part of the novel, it was on reading Kuznetsov’s Babi-Yar that the shape of The White Hotel offered itself: he knew Lisa would end up there. But why was it so obvious? The bold Eros/Thanatos diagram Thomas is intent on constructing is achieved at the expense of the sympathetic realism of ...”

“... the vulgarisation of Christianity, is a barn-door that has been riddled repeatedly by the likes of Peter Simple. The influence of Evelyn Waugh – the Waugh of Decline and Fall – is so marked as to be oppressive. The characters are facetiously named – Father Sporran, the Dundee of Caik, Professor Hairbrush (a philosopher – get it?). Since satire invites ...”

“... and technical virtuosity ... the almost imperceptibly modern, silver-chiming resonance of “Peter Quince at the Clavier” ’. These aspects of the ‘new’ poetry ‘do much to ameliorate popular displeasure’. Certainly under Marianne Moore’s considering eye all the starkness of the new disappears into her own vision of ‘all this fiddle’, as ...”

“... tanks and publications. Murdoch’s formal politics weren’t always this way. As a young man reading PPE at Oxford he wrote admiring letters to the Australian Labor prime minister, Ben Chifley. In 1970 the Sun supported Harold Wilson and in 1972 Murdoch’s papers, notably the Australian (a national daily he had founded in 1964), supported Gough ...”

“... The World-Telegram ran an eight-part autobiography of the new star. (‘My full name is Joseph Peter Di Maggio Jr,’ it began, and thus, Cramer says, ‘Joe attained his first major league record: youngest player ever to get his own name wrong in his autobiography.’ He was Joseph Paul, son of Giuseppe. The space in ‘Di Maggio’ makes another ...”

“... closed in’, relentlessly working on his scholarly books but rarely listening to music or reading outside his field of study, with little interest in society, let alone the high society into which Steiner and others suppose him to have climbed. Blunt himself attributed his survival to alcohol and hard work, and there is much evidence of this. Thus, on ...”

“... by Francis Hutcheson. This conclusion emerges from what is presented as a study of Jefferson’s reading and writing joined to a detailed analysis of the 18th-century meanings of key expressions in Jefferson’s draft. In so concluding, Wills sets himself against the scholarly tradition on these matters: Carl Becker, Adrienne Koch and Daniel Boorstin all ...”

“... and Jack Adams, Convenor at BL, Longbridge; not only Martin Jacques, editor of Marxism Today, but Peter Carter, UCATT regional organiser; not only Royden Harrison, professor of social history at Warwick, but Jack Jones and Stan Newens MP; not only Robin Blackburn of New Left Review but Mike le Cornu, shop steward at Heathrow. They all, with remarkably few ...”

“... marriage, inheritance and the family. While much of the spadework was done by French scholars, Peter Laslett’s The World we Have Lost (1965) was a penetrating attempt to revise the English picture. Authoritative documentation of this new way of thinking came with Tony Wrigley and Roger Schofield’s The Population History of England (1981), a product of ...”