“... to feel towards her, we must deny the insight, the disinterested intensity and the irresistible power of the major creative genius, gave to the novel the name of Daniel Deronda – on behalf, as it were, of both. It is a prompting that we have to defy. That is easily said: but the right kind of defiance isn’t so easily determined and arrived at. That ...”

“... with distance from a kingdom’s centre. Joan’s birthplace, Domrémy, lay in a region where power had been contested since before France and Germany existed. Authority here was peculiarly multi-layered and parcelled in a medieval world where those were the characteristics of political power. The Duchy of ...”

“... who ravaged the Middle East, legitimated torture and expanded unconstitutional executive power – was truly unprecedented, and probably permanent. Trump does pose an unprecedented threat to undocumented immigrants and Muslim travellers, whose protection is urgent and necessary. But on most issues he is a standard issue Republican. He is perfectly at ...”

“... political purpose – namely, to add a veneer of judicial legitimacy to a crude act of political power? Of course this was not the last time that senior English judges were to be brought into extra-judicial contact with the Irish problem. (Regular press reports from Derry remind us of an ill-fated judicial investigation thirty years ago.) It seems at times ...”

“... as if Shakespeare had now anticipated Clarissa). Choosing to be, and sustaining that choice by power of will, the three characters are nonetheless balanced on a moment, wire-drawn to the point of snapping. They are caught in something that is not action so much as a sequence of confrontations, in which their ...”

“... form of shadow state:The mafia … is a system that in Sicily contains and moves the economic and power interests of a class that we can approximately call bourgeois; and it doesn’t arise and develop in the absence of the state (that is, when the state, with its laws and functions, is weak or missing) but inside the state. The mafia, in other words, is ...”

“... aggravation of damages’. Soon after my own critical findings were published in New Left Review, Henry Holt agreed to publish both essays as a book. The Forward warned that Holt was ‘preparing to bring out a book by Norman Finkelstein, a notorious ideological opponent of the State of Israel’. Alleging that ‘Finkelstein’s glaring bias and audacious ...”

“... ago, of a woman arriving ‘blindish’ half-way across the world at Paddington Station has the power to electrify readers, it is surely because of the brilliant poise the image holds between internal feeling, ‘blindish’ or ejaculating ‘Christ!’, and the recognisably mechanical, external mode of modern experience. The automatic and the for ever ...”

“... for thirty years. Roughly contemporary, as a Harvard graduate student in security studies, with Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Huntington failed to achieve their spectacular level of success in Washington, although he did rise to a second-tier position in the National Security Council under President Jimmy Carter. His intellectual achievements, by ...”

“... a guilty secret’ and holidayed in Naples; there was ‘something inescapably homosexual’ about Henry ‘Chips’ Channon’s ‘love of lords, his passion for lavish décor’ and ‘his fascination with the Nazis’. Part of the evidence for Roy Jenkins’s repressed urges (though ‘there can be no doubt’ of his ‘keen and exclusive interest in ...”

“... of the world community on their behalf, now find themselves tragically on the side of an occupying power. What all these crises have in common, however different they are in all sorts of other ways, is that they pose to the political leadership the tough test of matching the diplomatic with the military timetable. In all three cases, ‘hot reaction’ to the ...”

“... the form of sati. Jasmine’s several incarnations are more than a device. They exemplify the main power a passive character has: to become someone other and stop the internal bleeding of memories; to clarify by starting again, becoming what others want you to be. For women, not only women of the Third World, this is the most available form of ...”

“... descriptions of Stella’s perceptions remind one of animal thoughts in the novels of Henry Williamson. Smells, for example, are important, and it is usually Stella who smells them: She stayed behind dipping her nose like a pecking hen into the front of her jumper to sniff herself. She hadn’t known George smelled, or rather that the sour whiffs ...”

“... York in a series of rented rooms by her mother, Fran Liedloff, after Fran left Janet’s father, Henry Hobhouse, in England. (Bett, the character in The Furies based on Janet’s mother, commits the unforgivable sin of changing the baby’s diapers in the dining-room of her husband’s country house.) Because of this precarious upbringing – she was sent to ...”

“... of Chekhov’s plays is not unique. Shakespeare’s begin and in a sense end as stories; Henry James could not write for the stage, but produced tales and novels which have taken to it in a way which would have startled and perhaps discomposed him, even though he claimed in his Notebooks, after his own theatrical debacle, that the disaster had at ...”