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“... could be any biographer bemoaning the pitfalls of his trade. With Allen Tate, though, there were more pitfalls than plateaux. Tate was a quarrelsome type and deeply self-important; he had a taste for feuds, for laying down the law, for scolding friends who fell short of his elevated standards – both personal and literary. Many saw him as a somewhat comic ...”

“... made war.’ But how (and when and where) did war make the state? This question is at the heart of Thomas Ertman’s challenging study. Historians and sociologists have treated Prussia as the paradigm of war-oriented state-building in Europe; yet the Prussian experience was far from typical. Elsewhere, in the Early Modern era, the planning, financing and ...”

“... only by faith. But he equally repudiates the natural theology of neo-Thomism and indeed of St Thomas himself: ‘There is ... no two-level reality, consisting of a “natural” substructure of truths of pure reason and a “supernatural” superstructure of truths of pure faith.’ The task which Dr Küng sets himself is that of showing that the exercise ...”

“... Sioux always get to be on television. They get everything.’ Alexie’s characters know more about basketball and Hollywood, heavy metal and Hank Williams, than they do about buffalo. His young men might believe that they’re supposed to be warriors, but most of them know that’s a hopeless fantasy. Instead they are unemployed, or in prison, or ...”

“... historians of later medieval England have, perhaps belatedly, begun to weigh their significance more attentively, seeking in them some sense of the accepted principles that constrained, if they did not determine, the pursuit of political life. It is within this context of political mentalities that Jonathan Hughes situates his study of the Duke of York’s ...”

“... surprised by the durability of his fame. He has been ranked among the very greatest of artists for more than five centuries, ever since he published, in 1498, at the age of 27, an edition of the Book of Revelations illustrated with 15 full-page woodcuts: unprecedented displays of technical virtuosity in this most intractable medium. ‘The Monstrous Sow of ...”

“... what was wrong with the old approach a new generation of commentators hopes to devise a more plausible and durable theory of lateness. What was wrong with the old theory can be traced back to J.J. Winckelmann, the 18th-century father of art history. Taking the history of Greece as his model, he put into circulation what one contributor to the Getty ...”

“... What​ is identity politics? Is it, to paraphrase Dylan Thomas, a part of society you don’t like that’s fighting for its interests as fiercely as yours does? Or is it, as Mark Lilla puts it in The Once and Future Liberal, ‘a pseudo-politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow and exclusionary self-definition’? The book belongs to the genre of responses to Donald Trump’s election in which liberal American academics turn their rage on their own intellectual-political class ...”

“... You’d have thought that by now his publicity people would have come up with something a little more attractive.Martin Amis, MoneyWell, they keep trying. Look here upon this picture, and on this. Both are unsigned 17th-century portraits, one depicting a man, the other a child. The man is an affable-looking chap, reminiscent of Phil Hopkins, a percussionist ...”

“... Henry’s reign, surfacing for example in the warning from the mayor of London, the redoubtable Thomas fitzThomas, at St Paul’s in 1265: ‘As long as you wish to be a good king and lord to us, we will be faithful and devoted to you.’After this unpromising start – a civil war in which the barons only narrowly opted in the end for the child Henry ...”

“... all too easily to mind. It is the problem of the mathematical sublime. The arithmetician has no more difficulty in principle comprehending one murder than 600,000 – the number murdered in the Armenian atrocities of 1916-17 or by Nazi Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front in 1941 before the death camps were fully geared up – or five to six million, the ...”

“... The Intelligencer was a periodical mainly but not exclusively of Irish interest. It ran to 19 more or less weekly numbers between May and December 1728, with a longish interruption in the summer, and a single further number in May 1729. It was written by Jonathan Swift and his friend Thomas Sheridan, a clergyman, schoolteacher and man of letters, and grandfather of the playwright ...”

“... most esteemed foreign reporters and analysts, including David Ignatius of the Washington Post and Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. But then, on 2 October last year, the journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and dismembered with a bone saw, causing outrage in the West. Even then, MBS’s biggest fans continued to ...”

“... and describes himself as a ‘socialist’ (his socialism may need some sort of qualifier). He is, more than anything else, a consummate salesman. He appears on Palantir’s earnings calls dressed in standard-issue white T-shirts and with a quasi-punk haircut. He rattles off quarterly earnings and throws out jargon like ‘ontology’ and ‘user-centred ...”

“... head always wishes that someone was making the counter-argument against a thriving car industry. Thomas Friedman recently said in the New York Times that the Detroit bail-out was ‘the equivalent of pouring billions of dollars of taxpayer money into the mail-order-catalogue business on the eve of the birth of eBay’. There’s something in that; when I ...”