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“... if we forget the essential: that they are biographies of a writer. Knowlson assures us that his prime concern with the material of Beckett’s life is its ‘relevance to his work’. The problem is that the criteria of relevance are almost exclusively determined by and from the material itself. In fact, on the two biographers’ way with the ...”

“... exercises, and I must associate myself with Jon Mee in proposing Volney’s Ruins of Empire as a prime influence on him. Scholars have sometimes overlooked this book because it has been supposed that it was published in English in 1795, and hence too late to have influenced the Songs of Experience or The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. But The Ruins of ...”

“... should not be underestimated.’Such was the ‘unprincipled political gamesmanship’, as Primo Levi called it, that expedited the rehabilitation of Germany only a few years after the full extent of its genocidal antisemitism became known. A strategic philosemitism, parasitic on old antisemitic stereotypes but now combined with sentimental images of ...”

“... lived according to his whims. At one point he went on an unannounced holiday from his duties as prime minister to take driving lessons on the French Riviera; on another occasion, he spent a week studying Buddhism in Burma, and tried to persuade his teachers that he’d stumbled on a contradiction in their doctrine no one else had unearthed. He offered the ...”

“... form of government not only regrettable in itself but also imported from abroad. Sun Yat-sen, the prime carrier of this Western infection, he describes at different times as a ‘cretin’ and as ‘a certain commercial traveller selling all that 1789 and Rights of Man junk’ – a description that puts him into the wrong class of traveller altogether. The ...”

“... vein, Gananath Obeyesekere argues that certain 19th-century texts which have been considered prime evidence for Fijian cannibalism should be read not as unimpeachable eye-witness testimony but rather as adventure stories or seamen’s yarns in which incidents of anthropophagy are no more than genre conventions. Neither Hulme nor Obeyesekere is as ...”

“... had just carried out a ballistic missile test, interrupting Trump’s dinner with the Japanese prime minister. ‘Rick is the Man,’ DeAgazio wrote on Facebook after the meal. The football post reflected the culture of unbridled exhibitionism in Trumpworld, the simultaneous embrace of presidential power and indifference to presidential decorum, but ...”

“... hundreds of thousands of them refugees who had been displaced during the 1948 war. As Levi Eshkol, who was prime minister at the time, put it: ‘We won the war and received a nice dowry of territory, but along with a bride whom we don’t like.’ Israel had to decide what to do with the bride, and what to do ...”

“... in 2001, it was rare to find a student who could name either the president of the former or the prime minister of the latter. One of the central myths of American nationalism has long been ‘exceptionalism’ – the idea that US history, culture and political life are by definition incomparable. Needless to say, this is absurd. In different ...”

“... to die or leave. There isn’t much room for the complex, human Philip Rieff. He was famous in his prime first for his intellectual biography Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, later for The Triumph of the Therapeutic. In a note to Reborn, however, David Rieff declares that his mother essentially co-wrote Freud: The Mind of the Moralist but that it ‘appeared ...”

“... tragedy in particular were permeated by religion, and on the other hand we have Aristotle. The prime peculiarity for 20th-century readers (though not for any previous century) is this: Aristotle, who was there, appears not to know that Greek tragedy was religious. In curiously uncritical fashion, we carry in our heads two perhaps incompatible pictures of ...”

“... confessional account of the inner drama of decolonisation. He dedicated it to Eric Williams, the prime minister of Trinidad and author of Capitalism and Slavery, and to the ‘Westernised and tragic elite of Africa, Asia and the West Indians, the lonely outsiders who exist precariously on the cliff-like margins of many cultures’. The ‘“whiteness” of ...”

“... of sophistication to grasp, answering to standard expectations of what an aristocracy past its prime would be like – pretension, snobbery, egoism, hypocrisy. Behind this local diorama of frivolity and falsehood, however, lie ostensible truths of universal scope: laws of the heart and mind operative everywhere, abstract and absolute, secrets brought at ...”

“... in due course. Schmitt, on the other hand, was never far from Hayek’s mind – standing as the prime example of a skilled jurist whose sophistry helped to destroy the rule of law in Germany, yet a political theorist whose stark definitions of the nature of sovereignty and the logic of party, at any rate, had to be accepted. But it is Hayek’s relationship ...”