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“... the ambivalence of Lenin’s response to Luxemburg. In Britain, the appearance of the letters marks a beginning. Verso is planning to issue her Complete Works in 14 volumes, making the entire body of writing available for the first time in English. The moment has clearly come for a return to Rosa Luxemburg. How far should revolutionary thinking be allowed ...”

“... into fugues of inspired counter-terror, then moving on. A suspicion lingers in the scorch marks that Home’s major project is Stewart Home: keeping his intelligence alive, gelling his retaliation in first. Home’s The Art Strike Papers are the ones you’ll find in Compendium Bookshop. The man who composes the post-humous testament controls ...”

“... hasn’t. In part that’s because of his irreligion and liking for blasphemy, which Leo Strauss claimed to find shocking. But those who see him as proselytising from an atheistical pulpit misidentify as inverse religiosity what often seems more like simple je-m’en-foutisme. The demonisation of Machiavelli in the anglophone world has often been ...”

“... Next autumn​ marks the half-millennium since an event now so mythic that some have doubted it ever took place. If it did, the date was 31 October 1517. The main actor belonged to a religious Order known as the Hermits of Saint Augustine, Martin Luther by name, though he also tried out a hybrid Greek/Latin polish for his surname by dressing it up as ‘Eleutherius’, ‘the freed man ...”

“... that vast field of inquiry for which Watt’s very title, with or without sceptical quotation marks, remains the usual short-hand designation.’ From the 1980s onwards, attack was the dominant mode of engagement. Parodying the accumulating barrage, Lennard J. Davis wrote that Watt ‘made some really big mistakes’: He thought there was ...”

“... of attempting to detain life, the vanity of hanging onto what is gone, the beauty of the marks of time’. There is no sense of loss, of regret, of a past world to which Rodney truly belongs and which we can recover: only an image, abstracted from our own sense of time past and suspended now in the present, like a dream image whose connection to us ...”

“... of important differences. We may note that Freud doesn’t put ‘conviction’ between quotation-marks, and that the ‘desire’ to act as devil’s advocate, a very interesting analytic diagnosis, is Reddick’s addition. What we can’t get, and what belongs to what I was describing as critical description rather than translation, is the discreet effect ...”

“... vision suddenly dissolves, Eve’s guide disappears and the dream ends. Perhaps this abrupt end marks the moment when Satan is apprehended by the angelic guards, or perhaps he has done enough: a seed of temptation has been planted. Paradise Lost is continually reworking elements of literary tradition, in large ways and small; among the virtues of Hardie’s ...”

“... her very occasionally urge on me the attractions of the writer’s life, instancing the novels of Leo Walmsley or Naomi Jacob – even, going up the scale a bit, the Brontë sisters, whom she has never actually read, but thinks of as local girls who have kicked over the traces and made good Down South. The novelist and ex-Bingley librarian John Braine of Room ...”

“... the lynchpin of his exhibit at the Salon, had turned out to be unfinishable in the time remaining. Leo Stein said later that Matisse dared come only once to the Salon d’Automne to see his painting in situ, for fear of scoffers, and that Madame Matisse never came at all. Denis was not the only fellow-artist to join the hue and cry. The German painter Hans ...”

“... of quangos. It is now a very long time since the Report on Non-Departmental Public Bodies by Sir Leo Pliatzky was welcomed by the newly appointed Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher on account of its scathing attack on the quango culture in modern Britain. A recent report put the amount of public money disbursed by such bodies after 15 years of Tory rule at £41.7 ...”

“... beauties of cricket as it is played in Pakistan. But it is his insistence on truth-telling that marks him out among political commentators as ‘obsessive’, ‘erratic’, or ‘eccentric’. It’s not that others fail to mention the lies and obfuscations of the politicians they write about. As Oborne points out, both John Rentoul’s book on Tony Blair ...”

“... the men are sitting around the bed of one of their friends when Mr Power remarks of Pope Leo XIII: ‘I often heard he was one of the most intellectual men in Europe. I mean apart from his being Pope.’ ‘So he was,’ said Mr Cunningham, ‘if not the most so. His motto, you know, as Pope, was Lux upon Lux – Light upon ...”

“... of government officials had links to a network of Straussians, students and followers of the late Leo Strauss, a political philosopher who strongly attacked what he saw as the corrosive relativism of modern thought and urged a return to the normative thinking of the ancients. Strauss’s views or versions of them were alive and well in the persons of William ...”

“... charm. Uncomplainingly eating the terrible food we offered him, he awarded imaginary Marx marks to the old Russophobe, making the assumption that he would have been a PPE student. (‘A beta-alpha for economics – no, I rather think a beta – but an alpha, definitely an alpha for politics.’) He gave his personal reasons for opposing Marxism (‘I ...”