“... Königswart. Metternich was an attentive reader of pamphlets and constitutions who understood the power of ideas and of the networks that propagated them. He watched the Jacobin Club in Mainz evolve from a reading circle into an engine of social revolution. And he saw how the revolution had transformed the traditional methods of war. Massive conscription ...”

“... than Methodists. The Mother of Parliaments, too, has lost some of her prestige and much of her power, and seems to many now to be inequitably elected. Finally and transparently, success has become elusive. The Empire has gone. There are unlikely to be any more attractive and victorious wars. Commercial supremacy has long since fled, and so have the ...”

“... Shamir rotating as Prime Minister and Foreign Minister. This curious situation gave each party a power of veto over the more extreme policies of the other. Following the draw between the Likud and the Labour Party in the 1 November 1988 General Election, the two parties formed a national coalition government, with Shamir as Prime Minister: but Labour broke ...”

“... fact that while her accession had set his wife free from her mother’s domination and brought her power and recognition, the fulfilment of his own long-foreseen destiny had merely ushered him into an elegantly appointed cul-de-sac. As the queen’s husband he had no job and no authority. The title of prince consort was not granted until 1857 and he never ...”

“... at the National Security Council once said. ‘I don’t think anybody ever fully grasped that Henry saw Allende as being a far more serious threat than Castro. If Latin America ever became unravelled, it would never happen with a Castro. Allende was a living example of democratic social reform in Latin America. All kinds of cataclysmic events rolled ...”

“... but no one who wants to be deceived,’ he writes as an enigmatic warning to himself and to us. Henry Chadwick writes of Augustine’s ‘acute sense of the inadequacy of words’ for the ‘expression of divine mysteries’ in the introduction to his translation of Confessions (1991) while Garry Wills, who produced his own translation in 2008, encourages ...”

“... Marx’. The translator he had in mind was John Broadhouse, a pseudonym for the journalist Henry Mayers Hyndman, who was notorious both for his socialism and his pronounced antisemitism (he once said of Marx’s daughter Eleanor that she ‘inherited in her nose and mouth the Jewish type from Marx himself’). Engels disliked him intensely, and it ...”

“... labelled ‘autofiction’ – was of little use to Barker. Recalling her first encounter with Henry James, she said that although she couldn’t ‘understand everything’, she felt she was being taken on ‘a profound emotional journey that went beyond mere comprehension’. Not that she’s entirely averse to comprehension. The position espoused by Jen ...”

“... ventures boldly into Anglo-Saxon England, progresses through satirists such as Walter Map (under Henry II) and Chaucer (under Richard II), through the attempts to reanimate classical verse satire in the late Elizabethan period, on (at length) through the 18th century, right up to Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It. Sperrin sees satire as being ‘primarily ...”

“... own view, which is very commonplace, remains the same: New Grub Street is a novel of extraordinary power, and without it the oeuvre would be no more than the interesting record of a pained but minor artist. John Halperin, of course, takes a different view, claiming that a dozen of the novels are ‘first-rate’. In order to reach that total he has to include ...”

“... the history of the Left – by studying the history of theory are in danger of anachronism. As Henry Drucker pointed out in The Doctrine and Ethos of the Labour Party, a gulf always existed between the thinkers quoted in set-pieces – Marx, Tawney, Orwell and the rest – and the trade-union argot of the smoke-filled rooms, where decisions were ...”

“... I’ve Ever Met’. It makes more sense to see Reagan as merely a living monument to the banal power of the media in politics. If you are going to have, as the Americans do, a political system which makes television performance the key to political success, which allows the richer party to buy unlimited TV time, and which effectively allows no limit to the ...”

“... expensive physical format of the book itself (‘made possible through a generous grant from the Henry Luce Fund for Scholarship in American Art’); the real ‘site’ is that provided by the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and the MIT Press, organs of the established order whose ‘discourse’ subsumes and defines that of the ‘artists’ it ...”

“... the court’s decorum is threatened by too much freedom in the criticism of women or absolute power. The speakers who keep the game going do so in defiance of the world outside the firelit castle. Unlike Machiavelli, a few years later, exiled to his farm and given the outsider’s freedom of speech, they cannot seriously ask if anything can be done about ...”

“... he was hybrid in culture. It is no accident that he started on a postgraduate thesis at Oxford on Henry James, hardly the most congenial of topics for an English literary leftist, but with an obvious appeal for a student of intercultural relations. His suspicion of fully-fledged systems is also, ironically enough, characteristically English. The most ...”