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“... and not simply about members of religious orders: Benedictines do not seem to suffer from it. David Knowles wrote a history of the monks and friars in medieval England that was instantly recognised as a masterpiece, but I can’t quite see a Jesuit pulling off something similar – though on a smaller scale John O’Malley’s The First Jesuits ...”

“... and Iphikles, the immortal and mortal infant twins born of Zeus and Amphitryon). Lawrence Wright grounds what he calls ‘this widespread fantasy’ in other peoples’ studies of separated identical twins: Babies actually do get lost or separated, and, however rare such an event may be, when a person finds his twin it feeds the common fantasy that ...”

“... He is Daron Aric Hagen, and Shining Brow is an opera about the early life of Frank Lloyd Wright, commissioned by Madison Opera, Wisconsin, Wright’s home state. The work was premièred there in April, but not having heard it, I cannot speak for the opera’s music. That, though, would not appear to be much of a ...”

“... act – that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.’ In an essay on Richard Wright, published in 1951, he wrote: And there is, I should think, no Negro living in America who has not felt briefly and for long periods, with anguish sharp or dull, in varying degrees or to varying effect, simple, naked and unanswerable hatred; who has not ...”

“... an argument on reason and the emotions, defended more fully in Love’s Knowledge; some pages on Wright’s Native Son and a paragraph on Forster’s Maurice, as successors to Hard Times; and an informal canvass of the opinions of American judges, whom Nussbaum (still in classroom mode) grades on the literary and moral quality of their published ...”

“... critically in terms of other people and their conventional problems. To assert, as Adrian Wright continually does, that familiar traumas and ‘terrible truths’ lie under it collapses art into convention, and indeed into banality. Shorn of the disguise that is itself, the allurements and the personality of its humours, it can look no more than a ...”

“... worth reading for a justification of his party that rises above ritual partisan point-scoring. If David Willetts was not already the best-known of the three when the books were commissioned, he certainly is now. Allegedly known as ‘Two Brains’ to his friends (or alleged friends, perhaps), Mr Willetts last year found himself in difficulties before a ...”

“... in a chapter that compares Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story ‘The Bottle Imp’ (1891) with David Robert Mitchell’s zombie film It Follows (2014). The former was published a year after the sovereign debt crisis brought about by the insolvency of Barings Bank, the latter conceived in the aftermath of the 2008 subprime debacle. Both concern ‘gimmicks ...”

“... the law has never had the respect and consent of the poorest and most dispossessed classes, but David Philips, in his study of crime in the Black Country, asserts not only that there was surprisingly little violence and disorder, but that the vast majority of the population accepted the legitimacy of the criminal law and was relatively peaceful, orderly and ...”

“... pressure to take on the perceived anti-Americanism of the Obama family’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, or Obama’s alleged association with the former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers. In the build-up to the debate, Obama’s campaign had deliberately goaded McCain into bringing up the Ayers issue. When he did Obama produced what was doubtless one of ...”

“... about new inventions, prepared to back them even if they had no naval relevance. Patrick Wright’s fascinating book is a cultural rather than a military history, dwelling on images and impressions of the tank, its impact on the general public, the responses of artists and writers, rather than its evolving strategic role and its transformation of the ...”

“... beliefs and conservative temperament, and religious and secular, as a congregant of Rev. Jeremiah Wright and a product of Harvard Law School. It wasn’t simply that he had experienced the variety of American life: he embodied it, so that his becoming president would be an act of healing, for the country and for himself. It is striking how often he runs these ...”

“... the name of his former friend and boss, Sir Maurice Oldfield. He claims that before the Peter Wright fiasco, and before the 1989 Official Secrets Act, there was no general duty of confidentiality on former intelligence officers. Provided what they wrote or said fitted the absurd images created of themselves by the intelligence services, their reflections ...”

“... David Halle’s researches earned him a licence amateur voyeurs would kill for. He got to nose about, more or less at will, in other people’s rooms. His study of the landscapes, portraits, snapshots, saints, masks and so forth which a representative group of Americans, in and near New York, have on their walls and shelves, of how they display them and what they say about them, required that he get to know more than a hundred and sixty different houses ...”

“... Philosophy’s critics have a variety of criteria from which to choose. The first question to ask about any philosopher’s claims is whether they are true. But there are other questions which sometimes crowd this one out. Is his work accessible and persuasive? Does it touch our lives? Will it last? With so many options there is no pretending that it is obvious what counts as success ...”