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“... of traditional leadership and social order’, in situations equivalent to that occasioned by the Black Death which preceded the great English Peasant Revolt of 1380. This sort of crisis creates a sense of total, oneiric alteration in which, since the time-honoured no longer functions, almost anything can be attempted. The world can be turned upside down. For ...”

“... less well than a lot of professional writers. The photo of a beaming 75-year-old Jenkins in black tie being awarded the Whitbread biography prize in 1995 for his Life of Gladstone suggests a life well-rounded in many senses. And yet, nagging questions about Jenkins’s politics and political leadership – and, indeed, about the shape of modern British ...”

“... film strips, children’s books, television sets. Eisner’s panels often float against black Expressionist nights or lightly inked Center City skylines. Some scenes are framed by purely visual devices: the beam of a flashlight, the viewfinder of a telescope, the jagged outlines of a bombed wall, the round windows in the door of a restaurant ...”

“... and Buckhurst had in mind when they granted him his freedom from the Marshalsea. In this game of black propaganda, Thomas Drury increasingly emerges as a kind of impresario, a purveyor of these incriminating texts to the authorities. But who was he? He has proved elusive (not least because there is more than one Thomas Drury around at this time) but I can ...”

“... this is daytime, but the light in these final moments of the main section is leaden, like ‘the black milk of daylight’ in Celan’s ‘Death Fugue’: we can’t tell dusk from dawn. All the same, we can put a date to it: Salomon left Germany in December 1938. Her grandparents, Ludwig and Marianne, were living with Ottilie Moore, an American heiress, on ...”

“... his superhuman consumption of Player’s, and all the benzedrine, could hardly have helped. But Michael Davidson, an early mentor, was not alone in seeking a more symbolic explanation and in seeing ‘those singular corrugations’ as the ‘seismic result of terrific intellectual commotion’. Auden seemed in later years to have been encased behind a great ...”

“... scale was palatial. The only domestic architecture which matched them were occasional outbreaks of black and white apartments. Hanger Hill Garden Estate in Ealing was puffed by Nairn: ‘A half-timbered square mile, and marvellous nonsense. Go and see!’ Stamp is drier, analytical: ‘The elements [are] used in such a way as not to pretend that they are ...”

“... Maingín … All three men have now died … Carrying their mark – the height of my kin, their black hair – I share these bodies, our genes, a collective deep history.’Joyce’s father was born in 1907 in south Mayo. His grandfather doesn’t appear in the 1911 census: he was in Pittsburgh with his eldest son, Pat. ‘My grandfather crossed over and ...”

“... How a Decade of Political Disorder Broke American Politics, ‘was how much had changed since [the Black Lives Matter protests of] 2020. In a little over three years, the most influential institutions in the worlds of academia, the arts and multinational finance had evolved from fully genuflecting in front of zealous young activists to trying to silence and ...”

“... Arthur Gold, a brilliant Luftmensch prone to tormented idleness, and the future art critic Michael Fried, were Jews. His dissertation and first book were about Joseph Conrad’s explorations of ambiguity and double identities. As Timothy Brennan writes in Places of Mind, Said was ‘a photo negative of his Jewish counterparts’.Said spent his first ...”

“... great British stability, and infused by a changing but always recognisable British identity. When Michael Powell in A Canterbury Tale had shown a hawk rising from a pilgrim’s hand and turning into a Spitfire, it had seemed natural. When English Electric developed the RAF’s new jet interceptor, the Lightning – tested by Roly Beamont – it had seemed to ...”

“... power? Runciman is not alone in thinking they can. The same assumption can be found in the work of Michael Mann, of which Runciman has been a severe critic, but whose scale and focus invite comparison. The common source of this bias is Weber – the dominant influence on this cohort of British sociologists. Fixation with power has, of course, gone much further ...”

“... seeks to avoid can be seen from another version which forms the most instructive contrast with it, Michael Walzer’s Spheres of Justice. Unlike Berlin’s, Walzer’s pluralism is designed to reconcile differing values within any society by allocating separate regions of jurisdiction to each – consumption, welfare, office-holding, art – in a normative ...”

“... as he sat on the verandah of his two-roomed brick house, wearing a blue T-shirt and shorts under a black cap, a Brahminical caste mark on his forehead. He had the serenity of a man at the end of his life. And, given the circumstances, he had not done too badly. I had spent much of that day on the road from Kathmandu to the Tarai, shuffling past long queues of ...”

“... Body Shop bottles on the bathroom shelf – Duse exudes, well, a certain sublimity. She’s all in black, in some kind of elegant, judicial-looking, Portia-like robe, and leans against a Greek column on a terrace, head tilted up to the heavens. She’s obviously standing on a stage – there’s a pale cardboard mountain and painted cataract in the far ...”