“... of the new government was to be directed to what, following Aristotle and his Dominican mentor Thomas Aquinas, Savonarola called the common good. The ‘common good’ is a great soundbite, and Martines holds that only the self-interested – beneficiaries of corruption and tyranny – will stand against it. I wonder. There is Isaiah Berlin’s objection ...”

“... scratching that accounts for the monkey’s having it.) The worry about consciousness is that, in Thomas Nagel’s resonant phrase, there is ‘something that it’s like’ to be a conscious creature, but there is, presumably, nothing that it’s like to be a tree; and there is surely nothing that it’s like to be a rock or anything else that is ...”

“... possessed. From there it morphed into an example of the ‘shock and awe’ so beloved of Donald Rumsfeld, the military doctrine of delivering ‘instant, nearly incomprehensible levels of massive destruction directed at influencing society writ large’ and thereby destroying the will of an enemy to resist. Here was Clausewitz’s ‘wish to ...”

“... suggest. We have some sort of fingerprints for writers such as Abel Boyer, George Ridpath and Thomas Burnet; even such a nameless name as Stephen Whatley, too obscure even to make it to the Dunciad, can be plausibly associated with several pamphlets, whilst Arthur Maynwaring is emerging from the shadows as a regular antagonist with the major authors of ...”

“... from a US Conservative Political Action Conference in Budapest, where Viktor Orbán had called for Donald Trump to be returned to office. There was an international feel to NatCon London. Young men in sharp suits spoke with Italian and Spanish accents. A Catholic priest was deep in conversation with a twentysomething in a kippah. Near the Free Speech Union ...”

“... the proposal to establish an Anglo-Saxon-based school of English at Oxford, the moral philosopher Thomas Case protested that ‘an English School will grow up, nourishing our language not from the humanity of the Greeks and Romans, but from the savagery of the Goths and Anglo-Saxons. We are about to reverse the Renaissance.’ Not for the first time, an ...”

“... matters in these circumstances that one of the best essays in the collection, J.P. Stern’s on Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull in the light of Nietzschean views of metaphor and morality, should be concerned solely with German literature. It is principally by asking what a literary canon is that the editor has sought to give some sort of shape to her ...”

“... to derive from the technical requirements of television soap-opera. ‘At the moment that Donald was phoning Bruce, Norman was sitting in Desmond’s Club in Charlbury and his friend Monty had just joined them.’ ‘Robin, at that moment in the cottage near Skipton, was eating dinner with Stephen.’ Surely the art of narration ought to be a little ...”

“... his juicy prospectus – seems a pity. Instead, we must make do, at least for the time being, with Thomas Underwood’s immensely detailed and tirelessly literary investigation of Tate’s early career, which culminated with Tate, at almost forty, on the brink of an eventful if largely uncreative middle age: a middle age in which the poet maybe tried to ...”

“... That is true of the unwitting world-historical role played by the American chemical engineer Thomas Midgely. In 1921, Midgely calculated that adding lead to petrol would make it burn better and prevent engine knock – it was a ‘gift from God’, said the first company to sell the fuel. Not until half a century later, by which time 25 trillion litres ...”

“... on the margin, is far from being a stranger to mainstream anthologies, while Basil Bunting, Dylan Thomas, Edwin Morgan, R.S. Thomas, Iain Crichton Smith, Thom Gunn, Hugh MacDiarmid and Norman MacCaig are unassailably part of our consciousness of the poetic landscape. Auden and MacNeice, too, though the omission in both ...”

“... vanished) of Chaucer being fined two shillings for beating up a friar in Fleet Street, to the late Donald Howard, whose book of five years ago presented Chaucer very much as the adviser and confidant of the great, writing his works in a vain attempt to keep Richard II on the straight and narrow. Pearsall remarks dourly of the first that it is part of a general ...”

“... in Latin, licentia. This sort of freedom has descended to us via the plea to the king from Thomas More when he was Speaker of the House of Commons that every MP should enjoy the liberty ‘freely … and boldly to declare his advice’ – a privilege that survives today in the liberty of MPs to utter words in the chamber which, if repeated ...”

“... André Vauchez has studied the later Middle Ages, and now two specialists in Italian history, Donald Weinstein and Rudolph Bell, have surveyed the whole of Western Christendom from the year 1000 to 1700. This peculiar form of upward social mobility exerts a fascination which may owe something to the sensation of teetering on the edge of blasphemy, or of ...”

“... to expend, some of it on art, particularly American Pop, that brand which, as the art historian Thomas Crow recently put it in Artforum, ‘looked like products being sold like products’. The network of commercial galleries expanded greatly at that time, as did the influence of dealers and collectors. That contemporary art might be seen in the first ...”