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“... She was a wonder, a legend. The writer Alexander Kinglake said that when he was a child in the 1820s Lady Hester Stanhope’s name was as well known to him as Robinson Crusoe’s, though he thought Crusoe was more believable. A century later, her table-talk (retailed in six volumes by her doctor-companion, Charles Meryon, and first published in 1845-46) was still being studied for the School Certificate ...”

“... The precision of the attack is astounding, and is matched by the bluntness of the condemnation. Alexander Theroux is scolded for ‘pseudo-elegant variation’ when he switches from ‘which’ to ‘that’ in mid-sentence. Worse still, the sentence in question is in any case ‘a wreck: ugly, untrue and illiterate’. Even greater names are not spared. An ...”

“... Chinese leaders had learned many of the American pressure points. Indeed they had. (General Alexander Haig and Henry Kissinger are only two of Christopher’s Foggy Bottom predecessors to have franchised their expertise in this way.) Warren Christopher returned to Washington to find that Clinton was determined to dump the ‘linkage’ policy on which ...”

“... Even the younger generation got in first: Philip Williams’s biography of Gaitskell (1979) and Michael Foot’s of Aneurin Bevan (1962-73) also long predate Clarke. Cripps’s biographer, as Clarke admits, faces the further problem that the Governments in which Cripps served – and his years as Chancellor of the Exchequer in particular – have now been ...”

“... to the painstaking anxieties of literary fiction. As he says in the present book about the work of Alexander Trocchi, the Scottish Beat writer of the 1950s and a figure he admires, ‘it rocks.’ Home’s novels look like fast-moving pulp, which in some ways is what they are, except that they are pulp with a mission. ‘Art’ per se being an empty bourgeois ...”

“... consistently attack bourgeois notions of the stable text but give the impression that the Arden or Alexander texts definitively established an eternally valid version of Shakespeare. The treatment of Shakespeare the man is a striking instance of the combination of novelty and received ideas in these books. The chief assumptions that unite the essays in the ...”

“... it is nearly as long as the whole of the rest of the book put together. It is not for nothing that Alexander Dru, as far back as 1940, thought this section of the book worthy to be published alone, under the title The Present Age, and it is in this scintillating form that this work of Kierkegaard’s has had its currency for forty years. Here, however, is the ...”

“... Nussbaum that democracy requires a strong national identity on the part of its citizens, and Michael Walzer insists that his circle of allegiances (‘spheres of affection’) starts, not with the outermost periphery, but at the ‘centre’. In a book with the same title, For Love of Country, Maurizio Viroli offers further, more sustained reflections on ...”

“... The Federalist Society, named in honour of the Federalist Papers (1787-88) published by Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, is a conservative law society dedicated to upholding with unswerving rigidity the original intent of the constitution’s founders. By 1998, the Society had around five thousand student members at 145 law schools, as well as ...”

“... forthrightly defend American empire as an exercise of raw power, while traditional liberals like Michael Ignatieff promote it as a way of protecting human rights against tyrannical regimes. Perhaps the leading current populariser of the idea is Niall Ferguson. Only an American empire, he insists, can secure order in a dangerous, unruly world. He does not ...”

“... make it tremendously intriguing. This new edition, introduced and heavily annotated by Michael Franklin, should be welcomed by both literary scholars and historians. A 1908 reprinting gave Hartly House the very apt subtitle ‘A Novel of the Days of Warren Hastings’. When the book originally appeared in 1789, Hastings’s defence team was busily ...”

“... likely to put modern readers in mind of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and other pop stars like Michael Jackson and Madonna.’ Yes, precisely. From the outset Liszt is characterised as a celeb whose life was bounded by the 19th-century equivalents of the private jet, the billion dollar yacht and the bevy of air-brained blondes. It’s true that there was a ...”

“... series of transitions from the rule of the pharaohs to that of the Macedonian Greek successors of Alexander the Great and, eventually, the Romans. Now they can add to that list of finds a signal contribution to the study of Greek tragedy. One of the papyri excavated by Adly contains 97 lines of two plays by Euripides – Ino and Polyidus – that were known ...”

“... for languages or football: because it’s beautiful. I have no idea what stars were rising when Michael Wood’s The Road to Delphi: The Life and Afterlife of Oracles pushed onto the planet’s surface, but so brainy a book must have a lot of air signs in its chart. It seems at first to have been born under the sign of Aquarius: analytical, determinedly ...”

“... Alexander Cockburn​ blamed Ian Fleming for the creation of the CIA. Without Fleming, Cockburn wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of the first James Bond novel, ‘the Cold War would have ended in the early 1960s. We would have had no Vietnam, no Nixon, no Reagan and no Star Wars.’ As adjutant to Britain’s chief of naval intelligence, Lieutenant Commander Fleming undertook a secret mission to Washington in May 1941 ...”