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“... of ‘historical forces’. ‘The shabbiest and most humiliating years of his life’, Daniel Bell has called Lukács’s years – 1930-45 – in the Soviet Union. Lukács himself called them ‘the most harmonious’ – they were certainly the years of his most sustained propaganda on behalf of Leninism and Stalinism. He achieved the ...”

“... pieces, made to measure for each performer.’ These are not, then, your regular factory-produced bell jars, which any old thespian can prance about in, but art objects in themselves and therefore worthy of public funding. ‘Under Glass,’ the Clod Ensemble say, ‘is an exploration of how we can live within our limits.’ It’s hard not to feel that this ...”

“... new one) have repeated them to new generations of readers, while literary historians such as Daniel Mornet have taken them for granted and proceeded to tell the story of the Enlightenment’s steady diffusion outwards from its Parisian source. In the 1960s, Peter Gay gave them new power in his brilliant extended essay The Enlightenment: An ...”

“... Perched​ on one platform, King Charles I; perched on another, the Dutch painter Daniel Mytens; lowered in between them, a canvas some two feet taller than the king, who was reportedly of small stature. If, as an inscription on the finished portrait insists, the likeness was painted ad vivum, then this might have been the way to do it ...”

“... up over the final overhang – and collapses into a company of picnickers. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris motored up to his chosen summit a while ago; and here, sure enough, stepping forward to pat the newcomer on the back and welcome him along, who should it be but Philip Pullman? ‘Magnificent … a ...”

“... ground down to prose, the apocalyptics have come to seem a little quaint. A year after his death, Daniel Farson wrote an affable, elbow-nudging Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon; Michael Peppiatt followed with the more measured speculations of Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (1996); and last year the Tate staged a small exhibition of his recently ...”

“... and the voluminous historical writing on the subject as well. She pays the American scholar Daniel Gordon, author of an important study of Enlightenment ideas of sociability, the compliment of following him so closely as to lapse, on occasion, into paraphrase. And yet, time and again, the entrancing fable dances away with her like a seducer at a ...”

“... Crusoe. A more plausible ethical interpretation is proposed by Laura Curtis in The Elusive Daniel Defoe. It is that we are to relate the island life constructed by Robinson Crusoe to the ideal world implied in the prose and attitudes of the plain-speaking Mr Review, in Defoe’s journal The Review. In the former, as in the latter, all the emphasis is ...”

“... it in her story. The Rise of the People’s Bank of China, by the political scientists Stephen Bell and Hui Feng, looks at how institutional change happens in a society with no place for overt political competition. It also conveys far greater anxiety than Yueh’s book about the urgent need for rapid change. At the end of their book, ...”

“... the things they really think. They don’t always signify, but sometimes they do: ‘One in The Bell before quiz’, ‘hideous racket, thought they could sell the old barn’, ‘what next Polish adverts in the parish mag’. Porter has explained in interviews that he imagined these snatches of village talk would have run along the bottom like an endless ...”

“... Greene had stood on an underground platform contemplating suicide, the US Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell ruled in favour of the forced sterilisation of ‘mental defectives’, including epileptics. ‘It is better for all the world,’ Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr wrote, ‘if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them ...”

“... detailed accounts of his relations with two girlfriends, Ora and Leonie, and two boyfriends, Daniel and Remsen (the novel is staunchly bisexual), who obviously do like him, and frequently tell him so, no matter how boorishly and obnoxiously he behaves toward them. Nor is he any slouch at self-love, for he is both a compulsive masturbator and an epic ...”

“... can no longer read his fortune: ‘Your future’s all used up.’ The writer in the first case is Daniel Taradash, in the second Orson Welles. She is the urban exception in the wild country, the elaborately dressed lady with the fancy hairdo who knows more about life than any of the cowboys or prospectors. She is indispensable, if not to the West then ...”

“... good taste and witty conversation, a haven of the ‘civilisation’ celebrated long ago by Clive Bell. But at the same time the dynamic new France, in which great thinkers shake the foundations of traditional society and prepare the way for the Revolution and the modern age – such is the view propagated in different guises by the French republican ...”

“... English that’s reminiscent of Hemingway’s way of suggesting spoken Spanish in For Whom the Bell Tolls, with all his ‘thous’ and ‘thees’. Everything is exactly described and faultlessly detailed, just as it is in the novels that precede and follow it, The Girl at the Lion d’Or (1989) and Charlotte Gray (1998), which extend the territory of ...”