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“... Where Are You, Alice is wealthier and more accomplished than Felix (though not as robust) and Simon is older and more enamoured of Eileen than she of him (though he hedges his bets more). Each relationship as it blossoms causes the redistribution of popularity, money, energy, knowledge, wit and security, and creates a tiny cell of resistance to the idea ...”

“... this barrister of Catholic repression is widely envisioned as modernity’s diapason: the clear, strong note of individual conscience, sounding against the authoritarian intolerance of the Early Modern state. Thomas More died in defence of an authoritarian intolerance much more powerful than a mere king’s, however, for he died believing in God and in the ...”

“... of Teju Cole’s books, Open City or Every Day Is for the Thief, has seniority. Open City made a strong impression when it appeared in 2011, and now Every Day Is for the Thief has arrived in consolidation, though it first appeared in Nigeria in 2007. Neither book offers much of the structure or imaginative texture of fiction, with Open City resembling a ...”

“... above the level of most of the other officers.’ Among the new recruits, he recalled, there was a strong feeling that people ‘like the deposed King and Mrs Simpson’ had deceived the public about Nazism, encouraging them to see it as a bulwark against Bolshevism and depicting the greatest evil as another war with Germany. This naturally led to a ...”

“... lord in succession to Lord Bingham. We decided the case was so important that we would sit nine strong to hear it, rather than the usual five. About a week before the appeal was to be heard, the Grand Chamber at Strasbourg gave judgment in the case of A, the terrorist suspect who had succeeded so dramatically in persuading the House of Lords to destroy the ...”

“... with meagre resources, he adds (so is Japan, but today technology is vastly more potent). Its strong points did not lie in magnitude of output, but in specialised crafts: high-grade cloth, paper-making, tobacco-processing, diamond-polishing. Technical improvements came thick and fast, ‘contraptions and contrivances of every sort’. Why did all this ...”

“... plot. A writer telling it according to the calendar, in Hynes’s manner, must desperately envy Simon Schama, in his Citizens, where irreversible changes in the national consciousness seem to be happening almost every other week. There are of course other plot-elements in Hynes’s narrative, less directly measured by the calendar: for instance, a story ...”

“... reading the wonderful fat new edition of Pevsner’s City of London, revised and expanded by Simon Bradley.* I found myself repeatedly escaping from the shallow architectural culture of Houston (founded 1836, the year of Texan independence) into imaginary rambles through my own city (founded 50 BC); and indulging a slightly self-conscious relish for the ...”

“... is nothing in that episode which would have surprised the Earl of Clarendon or the Duc de Saint-Simon. They would, unlike Mr Hersh, have seen that NSC staffers were right to compete for what they called ‘rug time’ (i.e. time on Kissinger’s private office rug), for an office on the right corridor, for a car of the right size and importance. These ...”

“... to avoid moral judgment even on the purely personal aspect of the matter. The Daily Mail, that strong supporter of the idealisation of family life propounded by Mrs Thatcher’s court thinkers, talked of Mr Parkinson’s ‘private folly’: but it is ‘all too easy to be censorious and to apportion blame’, it sympathised, and blamed ‘bizarre working ...”

“... of keeping women in captivity is to make out that they are stronger than you are. Certainly the strong Russian woman is a male literary invention, and by the time there are women writers, like Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva, the myth becomes irrelevant, though it is true to say that both poets were very dependent on men, and on being the centre of authority in ...”

“... Invention of Ethnicity in Zimbabwe’, arguing that while the Ndebele sense of nationhood, already strong in Lobengula’s time, as Rhodes acknowledged, grew sharper during the first thirty years of this century, the Shona speakers remained unaware of any shared identity. Yet even before the arrival of the Pioneer Column in 1890, the peoples of western ...”

“... backing into Australian limelight and the eventual glory of an ARA. He was a man ‘able to show strong feeling only when he was removed from the circumstances which had prompted it’; rarely at all, it might be added, in his painting. He was selfish and pompous and vain (an Australian journalist wrote of ‘the squid-like clouding of a modest soul in the ...”

“... suggests that Stead’s expressed dislike of lesbians, and a preference for men’s company so strong it could sometimes seem a dislike of women, must really have been the repression of a lesbian side in herself; and she cites two instances where Stead’s intensity made women feel that this was so. Apart from my sense that there is a logical flaw here ...”

“... as a sort of minor Wells, or perhaps a minor Kipling. But whatever else he believed – and he had strong, sad views on the world – Golding believed that he knew as well as anybody how the world worked, and also how its workings could best be represented in fiction. When The Spire came out one’s first reaction was to be astonished that he seemed to have ...”