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“... Democracy and Exemplary Democracy’. I can’t imagine my argument would have been well received by the theorists of globalisation who dominate American opinion on international relations. But these were not IR types or neoconservatives. Young neoconservatives (but ‘young’ is a tricky word: their parents are almost always in it) look forward to careers ...”

“... that the legislation addressed, but 18th-century fiction. The path she follows is not obvious, by any means – particularly as she has not chosen the fiction that most directly confronted issues of injustice (Candide, say, or Montesquieu’s Persian Letters). Instead, Hunt draws attention to epistolary novels of private lives and loves, above all ...”

“... Knopf apparently kept the book from being twice as long. As it is, I am guessing that it will not be widely or deeply read. One reviewer has described it as a literary bumper-sticker, something you have around the house to show your loyalty. Many readers will look up Lewinsky in the index and scan those four or five pages in the bookshop. The ...”

“... little else. For the most part, however, Kafka abstained from written commentary on the cinema. To be sure, there are scattered remarks in diaries and letters from the period 1908-13. But that’s about it. The challenge, for Hanns Zischler, is how to say no more than that Kafka quite often went to the movies, and make it worth saying. Zischler seems to have ...”

“... of the developers, partly in homage to the dead and partly because people feel it necessary to be able to walk where others actually died. (The phrase now routinely invoked for the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan, ‘sacred ground’, was, we recall, coined at Gettysburg.) Elsewhere in the same day’s newspaper, we read that the developer of ...”

“... for concern in the case of Guantánamo are clear enough. The assertion that the US was not bound by any law with respect to the indefinite detention of foreign nationals not surprisingly had a powerful effect. Guantánamo symbolised the primacy of power over law in a way that threatened not only the hapless detainees, but every other country in the world. It ...”

“... leaving the EU was that it might reinvigorate and liberate national politics, stifled for too long by the absence of real choice at election time. The EU is a legalistic and treaty-based political institution designed to take some of the heat out of domestic politics. That left people complaining that the EU was generating all the heat. Brexit offered the ...”

“... the collapse of the venerable retailer BHS in 2015 and his recent naming in the House of Lords by the Labour peer Peter Hain as a ‘powerful businessman using non-disclosure agreements and substantial payments to conceal the truth about serious and repeated sexual harassment, racist abuse and bullying’, Philip Green gave a self-congratulatory interview ...”

“... the loss of very few lives. From this moment we may consider France as a free country.’ By the end of the Reign of Terror in 1793-94 and two decades of war with other great powers, the loss of life had turned out to be much greater than Dorset thought. Yet the awesomeness of 1789 as a model of human emancipation ...”

“... our weather is the main ingredient in our education as well as in our conversation. Could it not be that the origin of the Englishman’s phlegm is a childhood of last-minute cancellations through rain of long-awaited treats, inuring him for ever to disappointment? In any event the great English painters of weather did not have to submit to the weather’s ...”

“... The end might have been very different. It was so sudden that it took the outside world by surprise, and neither in the notices that must have been freshly written, nor in those which doubtless had to be drawn from the files and swiftly dusted off, were there many reminders that the business of selling newspapers has for some while been conspiring with the pleasures of iconoclasm and the ancient sport of muckraking to further the cause of demonstratively ‘candid’ obituaries ...”

“... It used to be that historians searched for the causes of the French Revolution in the manner of detectives on the track of a master criminal. Over the years, unfortunately, they dragged such a bewildering variety of suspects into the historical station-house that one would be forgiven for thinking a posse of bumbling Inspector Lestrades had been let loose in the archives ...”

“... their tailor-made clothes, not ashamed of their cropped hair’. At once envious of and terrified by their success, Joan has to acknowledge that she belongs to another age: her place in the evolution of feminism is that of the ‘pioneer’ who ‘got left behind’. She is, as one of her tormentors puts it, ‘what they used to call a “New ...”

“... the time in La Révolution surréaliste; the other ten were unknown until a French edition edited by José Pierre appeared three years ago. This translation has an Afterword by Dawn Ades, characteristically learned, limpid and illuminating. Incidentally, Pierre’s use of the word ‘transcripts’ to describe the reports ...”

“... experiment are unknown to parts of Europe, notably Britain, the American Revolution may still be unfinished. Looking back in 1818, John Adams asked a fundamental question: ‘But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution ...”