“... by his UN colleague Brian Urquhart, and a perceptive study by the Berkeley historian Charles Henry that treats Bunche both as a significant figure in his own right and as a prism through which to examine America’s racial preoccupations. But no one has yet given Bunche the kind of magisterial treatment David Levering Lewis gave Du Bois. In his new ...”

“... with circulations in 1930 of 90,000 and 100,000 respectively). The influence cut both ways: Henry Harland brought hard-nosed American newspaper expertise to the launch of the Yellow Book, and ‘slick’ magazines like Vanity Fair and Esquire regularly published modernist writers like Cocteau, Hemingway, Lawrence, Dos Passos and Djuna Barnes. (The New ...”

“... the sensual paradise – and lies. The story of one such lie survives in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part I: ‘Was Mahomet inspired with a dove?/Thou with an eagle art inspired then.’ Muhammad was said on one occasion to have put corn into his ear to attract a dove, which he then claimed was the Holy Spirit delivering him prophecies. The scholars of ...”

“... machine’. Meanwhile, Halpern’s allegory of the soldier’s body attains ‘an affective power mirroring the social power of all capitalist abstractions’. To characterise the gimmick as an antidote to something else is at once to elevate it above the triviality which gives it its special interest as an idea and ...”

“... vaguer fatamorgana figures of your own scarce conscious hopes and desires’. The protagonist in Henry James’s story ‘The Velvet Glove’ feels ‘held down as by a hand mailed in silver’ while listening to a Wagnerian tenor. Hours of suffocation and reverie in the dark created a sense of initiation in a Wagnerian cult.‘Wagnerism’, Alex Ross ...”

“... Instead they were sought out in Britain and Canada by unscrupulous lawyers hoping to secure power of attorney and eventual right of ownership. Many newcomers took advantage of the new mood of welcome and entered Uganda from India and Pakistan. Most hoped it would be a way station on their journey to the West; some were stranded victims of people ...”

“... of Robespierre and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (‘Zealots’), and Boss Tweed and Margaret Thatcher (‘Power Brokers’).In 2020 McChrystal Group took aim at an area of business at least as lucrative as defence contracting: public health. The WHO estimated global healthcare spending in 2018 at $8.3 trillion annually, or 10 per cent of global GDP, and Covid has ...”

“... without even realising they are doing so – so it was with Dickens. Whether it be called a power of will or of ambition, whether it is a form of self-awareness or even of self-ignorance, there was something which ineluctably led him forward to his proper destination. The average Englishman, I have heard, catches two and a half colds a year. Ackroyd ...”

“... anguish and travail of spirit but with what he called ‘delighted glibness, a joyous sense of power in the use of received or receivable generalisations’. Can Trilling really have thought that the students would read modern literature – any literature – in a state of fear and trembling? Or was he finding cause for disillusion, of an Arnoldian ...”

“... traditional allegiances, attitudes to social inferiors, competition for privilege and power, and so on, were more likely to be crucial than consideration of economic benefit or profit by itself. Even in our age of economic man, individual clashes of interest rarely by themselves dictate political allegiance. If the blows received by the City’s ...”

“... author becomes culturally effective, and the translator a “noble collateral” with him.’ Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, relied heavily on Douglas’s Eneados when he translated Books Two and Four of Virgil’s epic into English. Surrey rejected Douglas’s use of rhyming couplets and drew on Italian verso sciolto to create the earliest form of blank ...”

“... Yet Charles gave a free hand to an archbishop seemingly bent on destroying the supremacy which Henry VIII had won for the Crown. Puritans were bound to ask whether Charles was not being taken in by Laud. Were not the Laudians, outwardly so deferential to the king who backed their policies, using his support to entrench the Church’s ...”

“... from a Wodehouse novel, she was more akin to some forlorn and melancholy maiden from the pages of Henry James. She was born in 1887. Her mother died when she was six, her stepmother when she was 12, her father when she was 17, and her first husband when she was 24. Her father was successively a lawyer, a politician, a businessman and a robber baron, and his ...”

“... robust, almost jingoistic patriotism with a keen sense for the arrogant ugliness of absolute power’. Pushkin’s poem begins with an admiring and affectionate account of the city, the only part of the poem allowed by Tsar Nicholas I to be published in Pushkin’s lifetime. But a hint of menace is present in the opening lines: On a shore washed by the ...”

“... the New Republic, as chairman of the American Veterans’ Committee and as a liberal supporter of Henry Wallace, Michael Straight became for a time a quite vigorous and effective opponent of the Communist Party of the United States in the years before the House Un-American Activities Committee and McCarthy got into their stride. He was lucky to escape their ...”