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“... Thus the eventual union of the kingdoms was an odd arrangement negotiated on behalf of Queen Anne as Queen of England with herself as Queen of Scotland. The conventional English understanding of the Union of 1707 is that Scotland was incorporated within the English state by Act of Parliament, and that, in the words of the chief guru of English ...”

“... waggoners and ostlers – company that certainly energised his writing. During the reign of Queen Anne, when he briefly walked the corridors of power, he looked in one view like a Whig in Ireland but a Tory in England, in another like a Whig in politics but a Tory in religion. Even these identities were unstable. A pamphlet ...”

“... cannot be escaped, a lesson she herself ascribed to the influence of Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power: ‘The mythical is not something “extra”; we live in myth and symbol all the time’ (Spectator, 7 September 1962). So the novelist is engaged in a half-paradoxical enterprise: she is to tell stories in order to free us from myth and magic. But free us ...”

“... rouge, the point of ‘stretching’ a short passage of dialogue, or a scene, was to heighten its power, and slow down time. Melville’s acts of ‘dilation’ sometimes seem superfluous, even perverse, only to acquire meaning later on, like the languorous shot in Le Cercle rouge of a barmaid handing a red rose to Corey, the robber played by Delon, just ...”

“... yourself and yet do not sound conceited’. In 1960, after reading some deeply personal poems by Anne Sexton (which were often compared to Lowell’s), she wrote to Lowell: ‘there is all the difference in the world, I’m afraid, between her kind of simplicity and that of Life Studies, her kind of egocentricity that is simply that, and yours that has been ...”

“... Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt and an obscure adviser to Oliver Cromwell, Eleanor responded with Anne Hutchinson (the martyred rebel against American Puritanism, accused of believing in free love), Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson and the suffragette leader, Carrie Chapman Catt. Feminist supporter of minority rights, Eleanor Roosevelt is our ...”

“... of referring to ‘Michelangelo Merisi from Caravaggio’ – ‘lived in a time of bureaucratic power, thought police and fearful conformism, in which arselickers and timeservers flourished.’ But his career also coincided with the establishment of the picture collection as a prestigious accessory almost equivalent, for the powerful prelate or banker in ...”

“... a new status in large parts of the world. But the current regimes in the US and Britain gained power by fomenting hatred of experts and expertise. British ministers, chosen for their devotion to Brexit and loyalty to Johnson, have revealed themselves as dangerous blunderers. Trump, still promoting family, flunkeys and conspiracy theories, has obliged his ...”

“... Elif Batuman, Edna Bonhomme, Hazel V. Carby, Linda Colley, Meehan Crist, Anne Enright, Lorna Finlayson, Lisa Hallgarten and Jayne Kavanagh, Sophie Lewis, Maureen N. McLane, Erin Maglaque, Gazelle Mba, Azadeh Moaveni, Toril Moi, Joanne O’Leary, Niela Orr, Lauren Oyler, Susan Pedersen, Jacqueline Rose, Madeleine Schwartz, Arianne Shahvisi, Sophie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Alice Spawls, Amia Srinivasan, Chaohua Wang, Marina Warner, Bee Wilson, Emily Witt Elif BatumanWhen​ Roe v ...”

“... under the tanks.’ That is too sweeping. What perished was any remaining illusion about Soviet power. The thought of a democratic ‘workers’ control’ socialism survived, although its supporters – like those Poles in the 1970s who prepared the ground for Solidarity in 1980 – no longer imagined that any existing Communist Party could be trusted to ...”

“... Singer was learning English. In his own writing, Foer has shown both an unusual faith in the power of written communication and a true believer’s willingness to test its limits. Although most readers became aware of Foer in 2002 with the release of his wildly popular first novel, Everything Is Illuminated (250,000 copies sold in the US), a glance at ...”

“... can’t be a legend, you have to be older.’ Thomson is not dealing in legend, though, but in the power of desire. Kidman isn’t just a star, or even a legend; she is a hegemon. How did she achieve the status she has now, at the top of the A-list of Hollywood actresses, and how has she kept it for so long? If you think Kidman doesn’t deserve a whole ...”

“... each of her uneaten meals with his habitual exhaustiveness’; but while Pamela, as Margaret Anne Doody has shown, dwells with loving concreteness on the satisfactions of the appetite, Clarissa carefully avoids such specificity, purposefully obscuring cause and effect where the heroine’s lack of hunger is concerned. And for good reason to linger over ...”

“... remarkable novel. They invoke Gil Blas and the Thousand and One Nights, Horace Walpole and Anne Radcliffe (Potocki seems to have mentioned doing something ‘à la Radcliffe’), and Cazotte, Beckford, Sade, Charles Nodier and Jules Verne. The blurb to the present translation speaks of an affinity with ‘Stendhal or Fielding, with glances towards ...”

“... to provide comfortable fantasies. It must also be acknowledged that they can possess great power – proximity and prosaic fact can provide a voyeuristic frisson which nothing on stage or screen can match. But all such reconstructions inevitably promote a false confidence in what we can know about the past, as if seeing it were equivalent to ...”