“... 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 ...”

“... Buddenbrooks, though The Effingers doesn’t have the purpose, the control or the independence of Thomas Mann’s novel; rather, it sits, like a sort of flywheel or epiphenomenon, on history. Its argument is that of history: the way that over the course of the empire, the First World War and the Weimar Republic, socialism in Germany makes way for National ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in his blue-bloodshot eyes as he read his favourite poems to us. John Dowland’s ‘Weep you no more, sad fountains’ was a favourite. Another was Christina Rossetti’s ‘When I am dead, my dearest, sing no sad songs for me’. Both injunctions not to cry made us cry too, as such injunctions do, the admonishment of the dying Socrates to his support team ...”

“... education was essentially an inheritance from the curriculum of Tudor grammar schools; after more than four centuries it came to seem part of the natural order of things – an ornament of gentlemanly education which served to mark and reinforce class privilege. In Shakespeare’s day, however, study of the classics was a pragmatic ...”

“... the Weimar period and his service under Hitler may have seen in Venator a defiant self-portrait. Thomas Nevin, in what might be an oblique reference to the passage, reminds them that there is a difference between literature and politics and that ‘the Autor, the anarch, is a Rousseauist construct, safeguard of an egoism that takes itself as the only ...”

“... from European governments. Far from basking in this acclaim, Elias stepped up his output, writing more books in his eighties than in all his previous decades put together. He also acquired disciples, especially in the Netherlands and Germany, who tended the flame after 1990 by issuing unfinished fragments and materials, such as Reflections on a Life. This ...”

“... Parshall’s The Renaissance Print 1470-1550 (1994) did for an earlier period: 31 chapters, with more than three hundred illustrations, which constitute a riveting anatomy of the technical production of plates and their images, the mechanisms of distribution and circulation, and the habits of consumption, use and preservation. For all his cautious ...”

“... daytime cafés full of men in trilbys like my uncle were the habitat of Berlin teenagers. We were more likely to think of boats on the Wannsee, a place not yet associated with planned genocide. It is hard to remember, though Hitler made it the staple of his rhetoric in the ironic plethora of voting that took place in its last year, that the republic lasted ...”

“... is a positive version, appears in Parsifal with both the negativity and the eroticism made far more explicit. The person who flies in, early in Act One, bearing a vial of medicinal balm for the stricken king – it can relieve but not cure him – is the same person who caused the king’s wound. Wagner makes Kundry systematically dual: in her service ...”

“... denunciations, and yet things are no further advanced than the day after the referendum. I found more preparation for Brexit on Zeebrugge port’s website than I’ve seen, read or heard from British politicians or (most of) the media. Zeebrugge will be ‘entirely Brexit-proof’, the port authority says. The view from Belgium is that the only place that ...”

“... comes only thirty pages before the novel’s end. And of their first meeting we are not told much more than that Joshua had been ominously introduced by a friend as ‘the man himself’. Riley is interested in a lot of things – looking closely, remembering, restraint – but is most interested in telling an old story in a new way. She tries out several ...”

“... the old fart’s bag of tricks still amuses. But I think I would have liked this novel more had it been the first of the author’s that I’d read. The narrator of Galapagos is Leon Trotsky Trout, son of our old friend Kilgore, the SF writer who has wonderful ideas for novels but can’t write worth a damn. (I’ve seen it said that Trout is based ...”