“... embodied in the relations between servants and employers in, for instance, La Règle du jeu, Henry Green’s Loving, in Wodehouse’s writing or Upstairs, Downstairs. In The Unconsoled, the themes of guilt and fear of humiliation persist, as do the means of negotiating them: excessive, insincere flattery, elisions, voluntary or involuntary amnesia. But ...”

“... or Arthur Schlesinger: ‘far from a neoconservative’, he is, rather, a pluralist in the vein of Henry Louis Gates, and his reflections on the differences between the terms ‘Israelite’ and ‘Jew’ find an echo in the American opposition between ‘Black’ and ‘African-American’. Suchoff praises Finkielkraut’s ‘paradoxical commitment to ...”

“... women writers who have been picked up will soon be put down again. Seldom do they have any lasting power, or any true or great poetic quality. They are all – especially those who have written in English – more or less failures. Failure is writ large in the case of the archetypal ‘woman poet’, Sappho – a distorted and fragmentary figure who serves ...”

“... by a vision, possessed by it.’ Nixon subsequently came to much the same conclusion, as did Henry Kissinger: Mao led a life as ‘withdrawn and mysterious even as the emperors he disdained’, and ‘emanated vibrations of strength and power and will’. You can’t get much more exotic than that. Spence comments that ...”

“... If a comparison can be made, he spares no effort to make it Appendix 1, ‘Prices and Purchasing Power’ is not an arcane technical exercise but an attempt to answer the question: how rich were the Rothschilds? His conclusion is startling: ‘Do the Rothschilds have a modern equivalent? The answer is no. Not even the Saudi royal family has a comparable ...”

“... Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) set out to increase American purchasing power by getting the unemployed back to work. For the most part they planted forests, graded roads and developed outdoorsy holiday resorts, but the WPA also recruited 40,000 writers, theatrical workers, musicians and artists, most of them on relief, to work on ...”

“... In London Labour and the London Poor (1861), Henry Mayhew recorded seeing a watercress girl who, eight years old and ‘dressed only in a thin cotton gown and a threadbare shawl wrapped round her shoulders’, walked the streets crying ‘four bunches a penny’; and mudlarks, principally young boys, girls, old men and many old women, who spent the day with ‘their trousers tucked up, groping about picking out pieces of coal, iron, wood and copper nails’ from the mud on the banks of the Thames ...”

“... what I would go to Stroheim for; his films are more like the ‘loose and baggy monsters’ of Henry James’s characterisation of the novel. Lennig rightly objects to Lewis Jacobs’s influential characterisation of Stroheim’s films as ‘not based on the editing principle but on the piling up of details within the scenes’, and points out that The ...”

“... of so-called negative theology, have given this elusive, quicksilver force names like ‘power’, ‘difference’ or ‘desire’. Leavis’s colleague I.A. Richards announced with stunning self-assurance that poetry ‘was perfectly capable of saving us’, while an English lineage from Henry James to Iris ...”

“... considered typical of an ancient Chinese emperor, he summoned them in the afternoon. Nixon, Henry Kissinger and an aide called Winston Lord quickly got into a limousine with Zhou and set off, leaving Bob Haldeman, the White House chief of staff, frantic with worry over their security. They entered Mao’s house, finding it ‘simple and ...”

“... discussion of a passage in Locke (the proposition that God might ‘superadd’ to matter the power of thought) implied that immaterial and hence immortal souls were a fiction. Lettres philosophiques appeared in London in 1733 as Letters Concerning the English Nation; a year later, when the work was published in French in a riot of illicit editions and ...”

“... my own age. This may well be true – it sounds true – but it’s not a thing one can do by will power. It’s all too difficult for me to write about: I never got the hang of sex, anyway. If it were announced that all sex wd cease as from midnight on 31 December, my way of life wouldn’t change at all. I tremble to think what mafficking most people would ...”

“... younger women writers, who admire her for writing openly and with humour about sex and gender and power and abjection. I Love Dick is ‘the most important book about men and women written in the last century’, Emily Gould claimed a couple of weeks ago in the Guardian. ‘Deeply feminist, formally both out of control and expertly in control,’ Sheila Heti ...”

“... behind his cynicism,’ a Swiss journalist wrote years later, at the height of Djilas’s power in Belgrade, ‘because he was so utterly convinced of the cause and believed so imperturbably in its final victory, Djilas could dare to think, and say, all the evil nagging thoughts weaker men had to suppress.’ It’s little surprise that despite their ...”

“... Fid. Def; Ind. Imp.​ Were there ever two more outrageous inscriptions on our coinage? Henry VIII remained defender of that particular faith for all of nine years, before Pope Leo X revoked the title he had himself conferred and excommunicated the defecting monarch. The claim was rebooted by a Protestant Parliament in 1544, but it was not quite the same, to say the least ...”