“... national identity, which is apparently a construct of ‘Anglo-Protestant culture’. As power ostensibly shifts to the East, a counterpoise to dismay over the West’s loss of authority and influence is sought in a periodic ballyhooing of the ‘trans-Atlantic alliance’, as in Philip Bobbitt’s Terror and Consent (2008), which Niall Ferguson in ...”

“... by Lerner and Loewe where, ‘for one brief shining moment’, King Arthur had enjoyed absolute power over his knights. (And Sir Lancelot over their women.) You might think that an invocation of mythical yet absolute monarchy would put bow-tied American scholars and editors on their guard. But you would be dead wrong. ‘Camelot’ is always cited without a ...”

“... characteristic of him not to see anything odd about adding: ‘An English historian can praise ... Henry VIII without being supposed to condone the beheading of wives.’ Carr’s views and prose style owed much to his experience of the Foreign Office, which he did not leave until his mid-forties. At Cambridge, he excelled as a Classicist (he won the Porson ...”

“... list of lesser-evil running mates for Roosevelt after the Democratic Party blocked the left-wing Henry Wallace from remaining vice president. ‘Who the hell is Harry Truman?’ William Leahy, Roosevelt’s chief of staff, asked. ‘I hardly know Truman,’ Roosevelt said. ‘He has been over here a few times, but he made no particular impression on ...”

“... and critic of its execution, éminence grise of the nuclear freeze movement and admirer of Henry Kissinger. Historians tried to reconcile these contradictions by labelling Kennan a realist who believed that foreign policy should follow the national interest rather than legal or moral axioms (he felt he shared this view with Kissinger). There is ...”

“... cites, in no particular order, George Sturt, J.A. Baker, James Agee, Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana Jr, Knut Hamsun and Elizabeth Smart. But I’m not being entirely fair. For one of these writers has already been singled out for extensive analysis.It’s an odd choice. Sturt’s The Wheelwright’s Shop (1923) is a book Davis would have been ...”

“... whose powers of acting and sermonising had been complimented by no less a connoisseur than Henry Irving, but who must have been a terrible father, particularly at moments when he took his parental duties with Calvinist solemnity. Patrick probably inherited a taste for drink and drama, a touch of Scottish diablerie with literary affiliations in James ...”

“... I am convinced,’ wrote Henry Church to the poet who had just dedicated to him his longest poem, ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’, ‘that Mrs Stevens has had an important part to play in the poetry of Wallace Stevens.’ This was in 1943, by which time Mr and Mrs Stevens had been living together in marital discord for more than a third of a century ...”

“... sermonised from this text were merely the most recent members of the exclusive club of all-male power-brokers and intellectuals for whom Thucydides had been a supportive, and subtly flattering, guide at least since the Renaissance. Herodotus, with his passion for freedom, his hatred of aggressive imperialism and his readiness to note the other man’s ...”

“... Yes, but with one proviso according to Clark. As Nietzsche acknowledges, untruth, or ‘will to power’, always needs some form of resistance to overcome. Untruth, in Picasso, is unspace, which can exist only ‘as the opposite of a distinct shape of space, a specific play of background and foreground’. And so, for Picasso, the room becomes the figure of ...”

“... enough to incorporate even Schiller, whose wheelings around, like his dealings, do have a burly power. Sometimes he was‘ ready to cry in his sleep that he was a writer without hands’, so it is good that he fell into Mailer’s hands. The creator of the film The American Dreamer meets his match in the man who now redeems An American Dream. There may have ...”

“... had admittedly been in office three times, but only briefly and on sufferance, without real power, while their adversaries composed the quarrels which had produced these interregna. There seemed no reason why this pattern should not continue. ‘The assumption of most Liberals,’ writes Dr Matthew, ‘was that the worst that could follow the first ...”

“... if he named the dean of dictators, General Alfredo Stroessner, who has already been 29 years in power in Paraguay, he would have at least to skirt around Comandante Fidel Castro, who has managed to rule Cuba, all by himself, for 23 full years, without the benefit of the doubt of even a popularity poll! Stroessner rigs his elections but at least he has them ...”

“... the ‘wickedness of politicians’, who were prepared to commit any atrocity in the pursuit of power ‘if they think they can get away with it’. With the Thorpe campaign he repeated historic tragedy as satirical farce. It’s unclear to what extent his scepticism was the cause or the consequence of his decision in later life to abandon the Catholic ...”

“... of both groups. Many of Cromwell’s followers would fall out with him during the rise to power that made him first the dominant figure of the republic of 1649-53 and then Lord Protector. They decided that he had exploited them in pursuit of his own ends and abandoned the principles he had professed to share. Yet there was another dimension to the ...”