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“... and Plath were integral to the English poetry scene, that writers like Larkin and Graves and Dylan Thomas seemed familiar voices in America. (And it was not so many years before that when Auden and Eliot managed to scumble the boundaries of nationality altogether, giving each country some legitimate claim to serving as the poets’ true homeland.) These ...”

“... William Fox first put into circulation the term ‘super-power’ – in a book entitled The Super-Powers: The United States, Britain and the Soviet Union – Their Responsibility for Peace – Britain counted as one of the three. Even then the label did not stick. The Public Record Office archives of the years up to and including 1956 are nonetheless full of ...”

“... from smaller ponds’. This battle has been played out repeatedly on different fields: as Keith Thomas showed in his magisterial Religion and the Decline of Magic, there is a long history of engagement between magic and religion as definitional categories. In exemplary fashion, the classical scholar and Catholic priest, AndréJean Festugière, writing ...”

“... one still has to fight for the phallic reality ... So I wrote my novel, which I want to call John Thomas and Lady Jane ... It rather looks as if Witter Bynner was a good influence on Lawrence, as well as being a severe and witty critic. But then, to judge by these letters, he was a pretty good fellow all round. He seems to have fancied himself as a sort of ...”

“... is far more impressive, by virtue of its convincing detail: but it also relies heavily on its powers of persuasion. It is much concerned to explain and interpret – the relationship, for instance, between Jewish collaboration in the running of the camp and the sacred Jewish duty to survive as long as possible. Or it will interpret suicide while awaiting ...”

“... have identified a variety of sources for Campanella’s idiosyncratic vision, from Plato to Thomas More. What no one before Noel Malcolm noticed – although it would be unmistakable to any student of the early modern Middle East – is the extent to which the city of the sun was modelled on the Ottoman Empire.From the Renaissance to the ...”

“... how many of them were sustained by the potential of their work, by the realisation of the great powers for good they could exercise for the benefit of large numbers of people. Why else did Donald Macnabb, a district officer in the Punjab, build an irrigation canal with his own money? Why else did officials work in the famine and plague camps, burying ...”

“... they took too long to do things. The Prof and his team of young economists and statisticians had powers to override departmental norms, to extract instantly the information they wanted, and – which did not add to their popularity – to nose into areas where something seemed to be wrong; Churchill once referred to the branch as ‘my ...”

“... to limitless wealth and resources, technology promises not only observation, but the novelist’s powers of arrangement and retroactive shaping. Lemoine’s drones cast a roving eye over spaces and individuals from above. (‘You hold the figures in your hand,’ he tells Mira of his love of flying. ‘You can see the whole scene.’) His phone-hacking ...”

“... In Scotland, it was difficult to regard her as a stooge for the English, given her detestation of Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey, who had been an unwelcome escort to her new husband in 1503, and who went on to command the English army which in September 1513 shattered the Scottish elite and killed King James IV at Flodden. Later she continued to be eclectic in ...”

“... to be rid of something universally regarded as real and of this world. Belief in its therapeutic powers did not depend on blood’s supposedly magic or symbolic qualities but on its real life-giving force. When, in the 1750s, the people of Paris rioted because Louis XV’s henchmen were supposedly kidnapping children in order to cure his morally corrupt, and ...”

“... meant no judicial inquiry, no prosecution, and instead a Fatal Accident Inquiry with no powers to subpoena which declined to investigate how the bomb got on the plane for fear of interfering with police inquiries. As political players grow old, they reminisce and sometimes they forget what they are meant to have said or not said. Five years later ...”

“... What​ is identity politics? Is it, to paraphrase Dylan Thomas, a part of society you don’t like that’s fighting for its interests as fiercely as yours does? Or is it, as Mark Lilla puts it in The Once and Future Liberal, ‘a pseudo-politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow and exclusionary self-definition’? The book belongs to the genre of responses to Donald Trump’s election in which liberal American academics turn their rage on their own intellectual-political class ...”

“... on the lab tests that the defeat devices were designed to defeat; for another, their enforcement powers were next to non-existent. Why? See above: Germany is Europe’s most powerful country, car manufacture is Germany’s most powerful industry. The worst that could happen, in the unlikely event that Volkswagen was caught, was a slap on the wrist and a ...”

“... decision for apparent bias, but that it was the four judicial conservatives, Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito, who voted to uphold the judgment. They may also now know that, thanks to a subsequent Supreme Court ruling, Massey need no longer channel its subventions through its chairman: it can donate to judicial re-election campaigns corporately and ...”