“... It made me realise that it was not coincidental that public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Edward Said held professorships at universities, which must be the last sanctuaries for freedom of speech.’ He decides to apply. Of course Danlin is only a hopeful outsider, entitled to his idealism. Jin himself must know a little more about the realities of ...”

“... consequences for domestic political struggles. During the Sepoy Mutiny, the Chartist leader Ernest Jones saw the Indian insurgents as a model for the revival of working-class politics in England. The Chartist movement, then in decline, could, he hoped, find new energy once the effects of ‘Indian mismanagement’ were ‘felt in our mines and mills, our farms ...”

“... then I’d be naming names. What about signatories to an open letter requesting that Obama pardon Edward Snowden? I spoke on the phone this afternoon to the guy who wrote it. Was the FBI listening? Probably not, but at least the metadata are within reach. Things weren’t always so convenient for the bureau. Writers under Surveillance: The FBI Files ...”

“... blooms in particular have been summarily attacked as weeds. The hot temper of so many responses to Edward Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) indicates that many scholars, herbicide to hand, regard Marxist historiography as a menace. Professor J.H. Hexter’s recent ad hominem assault on Christopher Hill’s scholarly integrity seems to ...”

“... his experience of the demi-monde and the down-and-out in pre and postwar France so that, as Colin Jones (another former student) put it, ‘the poor, the destitute, the marginal, the outsider, the delinquent, the criminal, the unmarried mother, the prostitute’ became enfranchised in his narratives. Cobb, it was said, put the pimp into the Scarlet ...”

“... The unpalatable answer is blindingly obvious to everyone but themselves. Colonialism, as Siân Jones explained in Archaeology of Ethnicity (1997), commonly involves ‘the critical scrutiny of a minority group’s identity and history by the dominant society, rather than vice versa, ultimately perpetuating the relations of power between groups’. It would ...”

“... Those Englishmen most likely to sympathise with the new arrivals, whether Chartists like Ernest Jones or George Jacob Harney, ‘advanced’ publicists like G.H. Lewes or G.J. Holyoake, or even established writers like Carlyle or John Stuart Mill, had limited means and little patronage. But most new arrivals found that their heroism on the barricades or ...”

“... of Stratford-upon-Avon is the author of the works published in his name: not Sir Francis Bacon, or Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, or Christopher Marlowe, living on in secret after his apparent death in a brawl in 1593 (before most of Shakespeare’s works were written), or one of the more than 50 alternative candidates who have been proposed since the ...”

“... Kinsey and Reich were investigated by the FBI, itself, according to Kinsey’s biographer James Jones, ‘possibly the only American Institution more obsessed with sex than the Institute for Sex Research’. What does it say about our own times that a mainstream Hollywood movie about Kinsey – a man who died almost fifty years ago – can still be found ...”

“... did Cromwell think any better of the Petition of Right, the reprise of Magna Carta designed by Sir Edward Coke to recall Charles I to his constitutional duty: according to Coke’s grandson Roger, he called it ‘the Petition of Shite’. I can find scant mention of this menacing language and conduct in those biographies of Cromwell which have a soft spot for ...”

“... stories are told about saints and prophets, or holy kings in Shakespeare – kings like Duncan and Edward the Confessor in Macbeth, Lincoln’s favourite play. Vidal’s novel is largely about the way in which Lincoln became an image of ‘greatness’ to his people. Among British readers of this patriotic American book the most fortunate will be those who ...”

“... while prating ineffectually about meritocracy and equality of opportunity. This is very like Edward Norman’s complaint about left-wing clergymen – taking it in turns for two hundred years to emerge from their public schools and discover the poor, as for the first time, and propose useless reforms. If Maud ‘had a weakness’, Sisson offers, ‘it ...”

“... self-pitying, iconoclastic rhetoric, to belong more to the world of Noël Coward than that of Edward Bond. Far from looking back in anger, it looks back with a fierce, despairing, nostalgia. Is there a more solipsistic cry from the post-war years – when the world has become better informed than ever about mass starvation, tyranny, injustice, plague and ...”

“... Hamish McIlwraith), angst (Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers), the limits of reason (Edward de Bono, The Five-Day Course in Thinking). The do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do drive in Western culture is indeed ancient, and has surprisingly widespread roots. The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing is Melissa Bank’s first book. It comes to Britain from ...”

“... but it did not fundamentally change its course. Like that of his longer lived contemporary David Jones (born five years after Rosenberg, in 1895), Rosenberg’s writing displays a sense of the continuity between a past passionately experienced through poetry and spiritual tradition, and a nearly intolerable present. Rosenberg’s parents were Russian Jews ...”