“... work, taking precedence over the philosophical rulebooks and homilies favoured by Foucault and Peter Brown in their researches on sexuality. This deliberate prioritising of the erotic genre over the philosophical is celebrated by a striking image on the cover: Aristotle, on all fours, ridden by the hetaera Phyllis brandishing a whip. Considered morally ...”

“... though Binyon, with customary care, thinks Cameroon the likelier origin. He was a gift for Peter the Great, and rose from servitude to become a general in the Army, responsible by the end of his career for all military engineering in Russia. Pushkin’s father belonged to a family that had distinguished itself in public affairs in the late 16th ...”

“... Dryasdust has had his day and good riddance. Don’t be deceived by the slick subtitles, however. Peter Lake knows more than anyone else about the religious culture of the secondary and tertiary stages of the English Reformation. This is not only a book of dazzling brilliance and acute intelligence, it has many important things to say about the ...”

“... abroad, just as there are for living and writing at home. Few of these punishments have come Clive James’s way. His poetry used regularly to be left out of Australian anthologies, but that is an old bad habit we may have grown out of by now. Mr James’s name attracts far more affection than odium, and he gets away with ...”

“... work by which he is – invisibly – best known to modern popular culture outside Russia, via the Peter Shaffer play it inspired, Amadeus, rendered onto the big screen by Miloš Forman. In Mikhailovskoye, as well as parts of Eugene Onegin, Pushkin wrote the historical drama Boris Godunov, finished the long poem The Gypsies, wrote the prologue to his first ...”

“... or despairing, about Starmer: his response to the Israeli slaughter in Gaza, his dalliance with Peter Mandelson. Against Burnham are the Labour-hostile media and the online posters of the right, now swivelling against him. There are also the powerful facts of the recent local elections. In the area Burnham hopes to represent, Labour took an absolute ...”

“... The Bronze Horseman of Pushkin’s famous poem is Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter the Great in St Petersburg. It was ordered by Catherine the Great (Petro primo Catharina secunda). Modelled on the statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, it was meant to evoke the wise emperor extending a main protectrice. Joseph de Maistre commented that one doesn’t know whether this hand protects or threatens ...”

“... US – but the House of Lords gave Berezovsky and Glushkov permission to sue Forbes’s editor, James Michaels, in London. Lord Hoffman, dissenting, noted that ‘the plaintiffs are forum shoppers in the most literal sense.’ In the years that followed, many international claimants followed their lead. (Berezovsky and Glushkov later fell out with ...”

“... In 1956,​ James Sutherland, a professor of 18th-century literature, delivered the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge on the subject of ‘English satire’. ‘In recent years,’ he announced, ‘there have been signs of an increased interest in satirical writing,’ but even he couldn’t have seen what was about to start unfolding in a year or two, on his very doorstep ...”

“... to give the hunt sport when foxes were not to be found. There is no flutter of drapery here. James and Mary Shuttleworth were painted with one of their daughters. Mrs Shuttleworth sits at a table with a book open before her. She has raised her eyes to look patiently at the painter. Her husband, to her left, in red and blue, rests his hand on his hip and ...”

“... of taste seem an absurd condescension. Even Pop Art was still fine art going popular, but Peter Blake’s and David Hockney’s mature commercial appearances rated star billing and held their own in record stores and poster shops. Minton did not have Piper’s or Ravilious’s Betjemanesque delight in the look of England, but his Death of ...”

“... an underling to ‘get to Moscow and make something happen.’ (Browne was later commissioned by Peter Mandelson ahead of the 2010 general election to write the higher education review that opened the floodgates to the marketisation of British universities.)The Soviet Union owned the pipelines through which all Caspian oil was exported, but with Moscow’s ...”

“... account of ‘Russians in 18th-century Britain’. Their profile was modest. Cross started with Peter I’s celebrated visit of 1698. Of around four hundred compatriots who followed in his footsteps, most enrolled as students, although there were also naval recruits, apprentices to shipbuilders and instrument-makers, and others (like British businessmen in ...”

“... Early 19th-century Edinburgh had a lot less time for James Hogg than for the Ettrick Shepherd, the literary persona created partly by Hogg himself, partly by the tight circle that ran Blackwood’s Magazine. Comic, bibulous, full of naive folk-wisdom, easy to patronise, the Ettrick Shepherd was invented as a souvenir of the pastoral Lowlands, a survival whose presence among one of the Edinburgh literary élites could represent both the continuity of modern Scots culture and the impolite past it had left behind ...”

“... surprising, because they involve much the same authors. David Wilson contributes forewords to both James Graham-Campbell’s volumes, and James Graham-Campbell writes for David Wilson’s, while Christine Fell is, as it were, the religious affairs correspondent for each of them. Magnus Magnusson’s ‘book of the film’ is ...”