“... than befitted his years or the occasion,’ John Galt thought, and Hazlitt agreed: ‘He may affect the principles of equality, but he resumes his privilege of peerage, upon occasion.’ Gilmour is nearer the mark to see in Byron’s touchiness and bumptiousness not the toff reverting to type, but rather a flickering unease about his fitness for the ...”

“... came under attack. Dress inevitably became an issue at the opening of the Estates General in May 1789, when the clergy arrived in their variously coloured robes, the members of the Third Estate in sober black and the nobles in a kaleidoscope of costumes; an early speech by Mirabeau challenged the pernicious distinctions this created. In August 1790 the ...”

“... disappointed and eternally fretting’. Labels like ‘virago’ and ‘termagant’ may say as much about contemporary gender expectations as they do about the Duchess, but they are not inaccurate. Of the deadly sins she could be acquitted only of sloth. Her lesbianism is unproven mainly because she derived more pleasure from her ...”

“... and ‘The holy hush of ancient sacrifice’). The plots scan also. One suspects that there may be some significance in the fact that there are 64 chapters, or stories, in The Devil’s Larder – there are, after all, 64 squares on a chessboard. Such compositional self-consciousness would certainly suit Crace’s constitution of mind. The various parts ...”

“... media, somewhat understating it, call a ‘transition period’. In a few generations’ time it may well be possible to look back and see the Nineties as a pivotal moment, but virtually an entire decade of ‘transition’ makes a mockery of the word ‘pivot’. ‘Uncertainty’, ‘instability’, ‘disorientation’ don’t go the required distance ...”

“... saw them again. To confront an empty space, where there were people the last time you looked, may make you think very concretely about negation. Writing in the aftermath of the Nazi death camps, at a time when the bonds of human philia had broken down, Celan commemorates the lost gestures of a spent world, a world of severed relationships. He does so in a ...”

“... also to be prepared to assert that my elephant is coloured. One is a reason for the other. It may also happen that someone calls on me to justify – to give a reason for – my original assertion. If I can show that I am entitled to the commitment I have undertaken, I come to have a further normative status. Successful communication requires that we all ...”

“... The vast majority of us who do not come from the intellectual, or any other, aristocracy may have good reason to be grateful that this is now an open question, and we can only celebrate the fact that fellowships and chairs (at Oxbridge or anywhere) are no longer presumed to belong, as if by inheritance, to the Darwins and Trevelyans of this ...”

“... himself personally warm and privately tolerant. Nonetheless, the story of ‘the two majors’ may be worth telling. They were a couple of odd characters who crossed Cripps’s path when he went to Delhi in 1946, to seek a settlement in India on behalf of the British Cabinet. Most of his links were with the Hindu-dominated Congress, so he tried to ...”

“... commercial and managerial resources required to build and fight a seagoing fleet’. This may be putting the cart before the horse or, to unmix metaphors, the land before the sea. Because of the sheer scale and variety of skills, commodities and manpower they required in order to function, 17th and 18th-century fighting navies – and not just ...”

“... story: strong, inventive and dynamic. If you enlarge the frame to include South Asia, the picture may be less rosy but it is still largely positive. The African experience, of course, is far more mixed, as is the Arab world, but there is no reason to believe that imperial adventures are going to put that right. Indeed, some of the greatest difficulties these ...”

“... World War acquired a bad reputation, but not everything that was said was a lie. German soldiers may not have bayonetted babies in Belgium as the popular press had it, but they did commit atrocities. According to recent studies, German soldiers shot civilians in occupied Belgium and France, they raped women, and they deliberately destroyed cultural landmarks ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Koven hopes that his revelation of the persistent entanglement of the erotic and the altruistic ‘may perhaps inspire and chasten those intent to better the world to reflect deeply on the implications of the choices made by like-minded men and women a century ago’, and no doubt that hope is sincere. But it is worth asking whether the approach deployed here ...”

“... we belong to the same family, that we speak the same language, that we understand one another. I may like a bourgeois better, but he is a stranger.’ As a child he had been educated largely by an aged clerical tutor, the beloved Abbé le Sueur, and, though he encountered the children of the bourgeoisie at a lycée in Metz when he was 16, he spent less than ...”