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“... is the title of one important section of the book, containing essays by Patrick Minford, Martin Holmes and John Redwood. Minford recapitulates an already familiar analysis of the three parts of Thatcher’s economic programme, ‘the conquest of inflation, the promotion of efficiency, and the defeat of unemployment’, which were pursued in a ...”

“... perversion placed upon it. The Wilson-Callaghan Government of the Seventies – the anti-hero of Martin Holmes’s thorough, if rather dead-pan study – performed even less impressively. The social contract was a disaster. The quasi-statutory incomes policy which followed it fell apart in the winter of discontent. The industrial policy became a costly ...”

“... and the first of six exemplars of anti-liberal sentiment, past and present, chosen by Stephen Holmes for dissection in his Anatomy. The others are Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Alasdair MacIntyre, Christopher Lasch and Roberto Unger. To choose Maistre as one’s point of departure is to set a provocative, not to say lurid tone. There are occasions when he ...”

“... never did. In 1917, with a lacklustre medical career and three decades of best-selling Sherlock Holmes stories behind him, he announced that he had received messages from the dead. These exchanges continued for the rest of his life – and beyond, if you believe such sources as News from the next world: being on account of the survival of Antonius ...”

“... to place some higher example before the world. Carp would have been appalled by the goings-on in Martin Amis’s Dead Babies – all kinds of sex, all kinds of drugs, all kinds of violence, if little or no arson – which was written a mere fifty years later, and has just been adapted for the cinematograph and directed by William Marsh. It’s due for ...”

“... the public balked at its application to railway engines. In The Common Law (1881), Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that ‘the customs, beliefs or needs of a primitive time establish a rule or a formula. In the course of centuries the custom, belief or necessity disappears, but the rule remains.’ In the Deep South, slaves had the legal status of a dog, a ...”

“... bushes, possessed by ‘a single unmixed instinct of fear for his young and happy life’. Richard Holmes’s impressive and absorbing Firing Line shows how accurately Tolstoy projected, in this episode and others, the psychology of troops in battle. Holmes quotes Lieutenant David Tinker on his first experience, during the ...”

“... bringing them about. But the distinction is not always so clear: the stock price of Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defence contractor, almost tripled between 2003 and 2007 after a former vice president at the firm chaired a committee agitating for war with Iraq. The Iraq war was also ‘the single most profitable event’ in the history of ...”

“... again. One sees, despite the chaotic punctuation, what is meant. One also sees what Sherlock Holmes meant in his equally famous first words to Dr Watson (‘I perceive that you have lately been in Afghanistan’). But whereas Holmes was deductive, and Barthes inductive, Wood is merely intuitive. If the photograph can ...”

“... To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), the poem shows Sexton’s craft, honed with advice from John Holmes, W.D. Snodgrass and Robert Lowell. Retrieved at the last moment from her ‘bone pile’ of discards to fill out the book, it had gone through 19 drafts before Sexton achieved what Middlebrook calls the ‘double “I” ’ of the stanza and refrain. It ...”

“... Except that she’d been woken up, and her night’s sleep ruined worrying about it. She wished Martin hadn’t taken his Encyclopaedia Britannica with him when they split up. She missed that more than she missed him. Tomorrow, she promised herself, she would go to the library at school and check it out. Now, could she please go to sleep? The trouble is ...”

“... The latest volume of Martin Gilbert’s Churchill biography is the fifth he has published since taking up the task in 1968. This time he accompanies Churchill on the long march from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour to VE Day. The book has all the strengths and weaknesses of its predecessors. It is a superbly researched chronicle, almost wholly devoid of explicit historical interpretation ...”

“... these, too, much of it sceptical, all of it telling. He reminds us that it was Oliver Wendell Holmes who said, in a Supreme Court dissent in 1919, that ‘the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,’ but also that Holmes spoiled the effect somewhat by ...”

“... here as one of Terry’s ‘sycophants’ – the others are Kevin Moseley of the Express and Martin Samuel of the Sun. Scholar suggests that – on the matter of Pleat – he knows more than he is saving, and no doubt he does: after all, it was he who chose to accept Pleat’s resignation. ‘I was particularly upset, as I had believed he was going to be ...”

“... a baffling assortment of characters ranging from Walt Disney and Coco Chanel (‘Founders’) to Martin Luther and Martin Luther King (‘Reformers’) with detours via the exploits of Robespierre and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (‘Zealots’), and Boss Tweed and Margaret Thatcher (‘Power Brokers’).In 2020 McChrystal Group ...”