“... isn’t a biographer who makes excuses or concessions in the hope of holding on to readers who may be sympathetic to some aspects of his subject but sceptical about others. He wants his readers to agree that Hoggart is ‘someone who has met the moral duty of the citizen to look out hard for the best parts of our history and has sought to make them tell in ...”

“... failure was a crushing blow for faith in reason. Zoya’s exile from the scientific city of hope may be Red Plenty’s saddest chapter. (As she is en route to her departmental show trial, the great Kantorovich absentmindedly waves to her and, in a parody of her own precarious situation – or his – slips on the ice. ‘Just another fat little zhid falling ...”

“... of the Institute of Historical Research and didn’t contribute to any of these volumes.) They may have realised, too, that, with the Labour Party now less socialist than Macmillanite Tories, the time for internal squabbles has passed. But their intellectual mentors, too, have moved in different directions, leaving the students with less to argue ...”

“... political system. The Lib Dems don’t see that as any responsibility of theirs, and they may choose to get out while the going is good. 20 ...”

“... but simply quite nice and quite sexy, which doesn’t often happen in thrillers, however common it may be in real life. It turns out, conveniently, that Berger has an open marriage, and the two heroes go to bed with each other on a regular basis. This has caused Blomkvist’s marriage to break up, but only because of his wife’s petty jealousy; denying two ...”

“... his poetic “I” . . .’ Such assurances are merely comfortable seats from which we may safely enjoy Seidel’s Guignol, remnants of an academic orthodoxy with no room for extreme autobiography. It has been almost 60 years since Cleanth Brooks wrote that ‘the typical professor of literature in the graduate school’ would find the severance of ...”

“... smacking of subservience, Nasser signed an agreement to buy weapons from Czechoslovakia. Then, in May 1956, he defied Washington by establishing diplomatic relations with China. Faced with these complications, Dulles reversed course, casting Nasser as the villain. Yet, according to Nichols, his motives had less to do with Nasser’s behaviour than with ...”

“... accounts, spend much time alone there. Badovici was a heavy drinker and a womaniser: factors that may have had less to do with their eventual split than his more general need for company and the intrusion into their life together of the architect they both revered. Le Corbusier had admired Gray’s unrealised projects, and now became a regular visitor to ...”

“... been anointed by the media and Italy’s chatterbox prosecutors as the capo della mafia. Decades may have passed since my childhood in Palermo but it’s as improbable as ever that its chief would be a rustic outlaw. The evidence that proves the continuity of high-level leadership begins with Salvatore ‘Totò’ Cuffaro, until January 2008 president of the ...”

“... By a bizarre twist, G.K. Chesterton may be en route to sanctity: it was reported in August that the Bishop of Northampton has begun a suit for his canonisation. Diarmaid MacCulloch doesn’t invoke Chesterton’s miracle-working powers, but he opens this expanded version of his 2012 Gifford Lectures with a Father Brown story, ‘The Oracle of the Dog’: by howling at a certain time, the animal gives the priestly sleuth the clue to the murder weapon ...”

“... dramatic dimensions. Only the postgraduate’s philosophical and literary adventures with Theory may be one dimension too many, not doing much to further an understanding of Hegel, Marx, Foucault and Adorno, or of Marco Roth. Eugene was an emotional monster of a father, but he did at least point his son to The Way of All Flesh, Fathers and ...”

“... on the pilot got up and running. ‘Shut off your cameras,’ said the arresting officer, which may be what Los Angeles police say now instead of reading people their Miranda Rights. But don’t worry: the cameras were back on soon enough to catch the family deploring the idea that Alexis was a thief. ‘Maybe this was just the universe sending a wake-up ...”

“... generals succeed and become celebrated, to contrive excuses to have them killed. ‘A man of power may do little himself, yet gain glory through his retainers,’ a soldier says on the eve of a battle, while Yoritomo is safely ensconced on his estate in Kamakura. It could be the motto of the new feudal age. ‘The Heike felt still caught in ice,/like birds of ...”

“... of 2008? Ferguson argues strongly that it does not. The advent of the hostile takeover bid may have presaged a more aggressive style of capitalism, but the eurobond market was in many ways financially conservative – turning hot money into a stable source of long-term capital. Ferguson’s main point, however, is that Warburg was a strong advocate of ...”

“... was once burned in effigy by the plain people of Haworth with a potato in his hand.* The Brontës may have tried to become plus anglais que les anglais, in a long tradition of literary emigration to these shores, but their neighbours weren’t fooled. The family was lower middle-class, caught between a hard-headed contempt for the gentry whose pampered brats ...”