“... to the funfair Disneyland and, ultimately, the educational park Disneyworld. (George, unlike Walt, may live to see his academy: he’s still under 40.) Like Disney, Lucas has a special relationship with the child and, like Disney again, he has the knack of treating his largely adult audiences as boys and tomboys without offending their dignity. (Although more ...”

“... I have to confess that before starting on this review I hadn’t read Robert Brandom’s massive Making It Explicit (1994). Although it’s famous, very few of my colleagues have read it either (I mean read it, not just bought it or dipped their toes in it). Writing such a walrus of a book is a risky business. Life is short and it’s publish or perish; so a lot is written and little is read ...”

“... wrote it. But do they actually do this? I suggest that they skip what is not worth reading, and it may be that they have cultivated the art of skipping to their profit; but most people haven’t: it is surely better that they should have their skipping done for them by someone of taste and discrimination. Here’s a paragraph Maugham struck from the first ...”

“... life-in-its-time is of more interest than her work. These days biography sells, and we may be moving to a point where fiction is seen to be no more than a useful biographical resource. Blackwood’s Lady-Carolineness, her unhappy childhood, busy sex life, connections to major figures in art and literature, and gaudy drinking does make her a ...”

“... reported that passing aircraft could interfere with radio reception. Less than a year later, Robert Watson-Watt demonstrated by a simple experiment in a field outside Daventry that aircraft could be detected by radio. Radar was born. Remarkably, it was only two years after this that Lindemann demonstrated to Churchill that tinfoil strips cut to a certain ...”

“... Butler’s The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897) is the apotheosis of the idea (later picked up by Robert Graves) that the Odyssey is too charming to have been written by a man, and that, moreover, no man would make a heroic journey out of a return to a middle-aged wife. But women are not incidental to the Iliad. Helen’s abduction has caused the war, and the ...”

“... pamphlets: in 1520 the Oxford bookseller John Dorne had A Little Gest of Robin Hood for tuppence, Robert the Devil for thruppence. Orme makes the suggestion that cheap ‘jest-books’, short collections of riddles and stories, can be seen as forerunners of children’s comics.Around the age of seven, a privileged few boys would move on to grammar ...”

“... of habeas corpus has in recent years lost much of its practical importance. Experienced judges may retire without ever having granted the remedy, or being asked to do so. This is not because today’s judges are less protective of personal liberty than their forebears – perhaps the reverse is true. It is because the function of habeas corpus has, to a ...”

“... the president and his party fresh confidence in their efforts at comprehensive reform. Whatever may happen now, it was plain the defeat of healthcare would have been a death-blow to the Obama presidency; its passage has given him time to discover the means for a renewal of presidential energy. Yet the bill passed without a single Republican vote, and its ...”

“... while levying heavy tariffs to protect landowners’ profits. Liberals, and liberal Tories like Robert Peel, realised that slimming the state allowed them to defend it better against this radical critique. After the 2008 financial crisis, the Conservative political strategy of ‘austerity’ meant that Labour could be identified as irresponsible high ...”

“... got to get them out of here.’ And my grandmother, whatever reassuring fictions she may have told her children, took her jewellery with her, and ordered the maid servants to pack a trunk of family valuables. Some shadow passed across her mind, and she took precautions, and that is why there is a silver ewer and basin in my house, one piece of ...”

“... concedes a pleasing serendipity: anthoi, logia, ‘a gathering of flowers’. The Elizabethans may have been more inventive, with their Handful of Pleasant Delights and Paradise of Dainty Devices, but an apologetic impulse remains apparent in the way they name miscellanies. How much has changed? We read The Golden Treasury or, as indicatively, The Rattle ...”

“... between this foreign policy crisis and domestic democratic politics. That is the main concern of Robert Crowcroft’s new book, but there may also be broader lessons, of relevance to Britain’s present predicament. A core assumption of those who write about the ‘appeasement’ crisis has always been that it does indeed ...”

“... plans for a new show set in an alternative reality, in which the Confederate South, led by General Robert E. Lee, has successfully seceded from the Union. D.B. Weiss, one of the producers of Confederate, explained the thinking behind the series: ‘What would the world have looked like if Lee had sacked DC, if the South had won – that just always fascinated ...”

“... Margaret is mourning only for herself; just that she is mourning for herself, whatever else she may be mourning for as well, and however deep or shallow that mourning may be. We are always the subject of our own tears, but not the only subject; and knowing the many other reasons why we weep is a complicated affair, often ...”