“... sincere, you understand, are not good things to be. Again, the key is Tolstoy (and Shakespeare). Power and sincerity may be concepts which most criticism and many hundreds of writers have venerated, yet as far as Bayley is concerned, Tolstoy’s easy epic power reveals how unnaturally most writers employ ...”

“... progress, in short, was bound up with particular social arrangements, and shaped by the relative power of different classes. It was the capitalist who used machinery to facilitate the division of labour. It was the proletarian, with only his labour to sell, who found himself thereby put in a new position. He became, as the economist J. B. Say put it, ‘a ...”

“... The progress of science was evident not only in its ever increasing depth of understanding, its power of explanation and its ability to predict, but in the applications that flowed from it. If technology was progressive, then its progressiveness must arise from its changing scientific basis. But historians of science followed Butterfield’s preaching more ...”

“... and for himself gave him a way of dreaming about America and the frontier, a way of understanding power and modernity. ‘For Britain, the Irish are the Indians to the far west, circling the wagons of imperial civilisation,’ Fintan O’Toole writes in The Lie of the Land: Irish Identities. ‘Once in America, of course, the Irish cease to be the Indians and ...”

“... on Whitman, including opera and painting, and about the influence of Whitman on others, including Henry James – who read Whitman, he told Edith Wharton, in ‘a mood of subdued ecstasy’ – and Hopkins, who wrote: ‘I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than any man living.’ ‘Hopkins must have been ...”

“... of discovery as the young lovers take flight back to the Sicilia of Leontes.The play’s peculiar power, even its sweetness, derives from the sense of seasonal alternation and the movement from the dark winter bitterness of Sicilia to the calm perpetuity of Perdita’s May or June Bohemian sheep-shearing feast. Understandably, when, fifty or sixty years ...”

“... critic, having assured Elena that anyone who finds her novel risqué is an idiot who hasn’t read Henry Miller, gets drunk and assaults her in a lift. Meanwhile, Elena’s university friends are too caught up in workers’ rights to take her novel seriously. As one classmate puts it, ‘You did everything possible, right? But this, objectively, is not the ...”

“... and Simone Signoret, Jowett (of Balliol fame), James Agate, Jane Austen, Molly Bloom, Hegel and Henry James, all of them biting the distinguished dust. 2 June. A situation on the margins of social interaction develops opposite. Working outside No. 60 is a handsome, though rather explosive-looking young workman who is emptying sand onto the pavement ...”

“... how dead a human being can get and still be alive; an awe-inspiring sort of patience and power to endure, proper to granite but uncanny in flesh and blood. The minimal self-presentation of Langdon is admired to the last inch of inscrutable pathos; so are the rigged but entirely satisfying acrobatic sequences of Harold Lloyd; and the pie-fight in a ...”

“... or you are nothing when you choose submission to your wife’s caprice as your vocation. You are Henry James’s novelist on whom nothing dare be lost.’ Felix is not actually writing a novel, but evidently the novel we are reading is the one he isn’t writing, since his sex life, and Marisa’s, are ‘a salacious fiction I wrote in imitation of all the ...”

“... Roman centurion piercing the side of the crucified Christ in Rubens’s painting. Ultimately, the power of the photograph derives from the centrality of Old Glory itself. Rakes desecrated the flag by using it as a weapon, but in doing so he revealed the inextricable connection between racism and American patriotism, between America’s long history of racial ...”

“... or conceived. But the later books (Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion) deal with money and power at greater depth. The French threat and the fear of revolution and poverty are familiar Austenite topics but probably don’t much disturb the ordinary reader or the TV audience, unless they are willing to consult a work of this kind. It is said that among ...”

“... the now almost forgotten C.P. Snow; unjustly forgotten, because his ponderous novels about hope, power and prestige tell us much about the public and academic life of his period. In a sense the debate was about the 1930s, the scientists’ age of glory and the disappointed poets’ low, dishonest or otherwise depreciable decade. In a narrower sense it ...”

“... grounds that it is a side effect of a broader economic success from which everyone benefits. As Henry Ford recognised, if you don’t pay ordinary workers decent wages, the economy will lack the demand to sustain economic growth. Hanauer is in the vanguard of the ‘Fight for 15’, the campaign for a $15 minimum wage. Like Bill Gates and Warren ...”

“... nature presented, in addition to the reassuring face of beauty, a terrifying and awe-inspiring power, embodied in thunderstorms and craggy cliffs – never appealed to him. Amid the overpowering Sturm und Drang of Yosemite, he paused to admire instead a meadow divided by a meandering stream: ‘The stream is such a one as Shakespeare delighted in, and ...”