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“... have been colonised into the EU.’ That morning Allister had been on BBC Radio Ulster’s rowdy Stephen Nolan show. Most of his guests and callers are indignant unionist men. Nolan seemed to have been briefed by DUP sources that Donaldson was considering a version of the EU’s customs regime (the party has an inconsistent record on the protocol) and ...”

“... my most puzzled admiration.’The line about trusting tales appears as an epigraph to Frances Wilson’s vivid and unusual new book. The quotation runs on to Lawrence’s next sentence, which constitutes a peculiar sort of commission: ‘The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.’ Its application to his own ...”

“... is currently so popular with wealthy white men in Silicon Valley or Wall Street; Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman’s The Daily Stoic (2016), for example, has been a bestseller in the Business Motivation, Success Self-Help and Greek and Roman Philosophy categories. How useful is Epictetus’ version of Stoicism as a tool for getting through ...”

“... but not the last volume. He’s rewriting his own history. Apparently he didn’t even know Edmund Wilson all that well, and I don’t think Wilson much liked him.’ He said he’d read Wilson’s letters straight through, liked them very much, but still didn’t know why ...”

“... them with fancy-dress pageants.The first signs of a new American dispensation came with Woodrow Wilson, who considered Central America a field for democratic tutelage, with interventions between 1913 and 1916 in Mexico, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. ‘We have with armed force invaded, made war upon, and conquered the two small republics,’ Teddy ...”

“... a little bit of success, and would have done more if it hadn’t been for bankers or, as Harold Wilson used to call his hidden enemies, “speculators”.’ Only Tony Benn, even as he was signing papers in the red dispatch boxes, travelling round in chauffeur-driven limousines and dining at Lockets, began to realise that he was playing a lead part in a ...”

“... the reassuring story of the UK’s first Euro-referendum in 1975. Then, the prime minister, Harold Wilson, had gone through the motions of a renegotiation of Britain’s place in the European Economic Community and, with that token effort behind him, shepherded the forces of pragmatism to a resounding victory for remaining in the Common Market. The ...”

“... there are real foreigners to hassle, and respectable politicians happy to provide cover. Sammy Wilson of the DUP weighed in this January: ‘When it comes to a downturn, I think if jobs are becoming vacant . . . preference should be given to people from Northern Ireland.’ Wilson’s colleague Jeffrey Donaldson backed ...”

“... what he called the ‘latrine’ of Hollywood, Lorre’s place in the theatre world was eccentric. Stephen Youngkin’s reverent and scholarly new biography shows that the recurring themes of Lorre’s acting life were already set before he fled to Paris from Vienna in 1933: his distinctive mixture of comedy and creepiness, his struggle to avoid being ...”

“... For the moment, I want to consider its historical evidence against a provocative assertion by A.N. Wilson, quoted in Anthony Blond’s Book Book. According to Wilson (don, novelist, Sunday Telegraph reviewer, Young Fogey and former literary editor of the Spectator), there is now no literary reviewing worth the name in ...”

“... problem is not so much to explain the rise of the so-called ‘New Historicism’ associated with Stephen Greenblatt and his friends and followers, as to account for the hostile reactions to it. Why should it be considered subversive to replace literary texts in their historical contexts? Is the movement dangerous because it is historicist or because it is ...”

“... principled isolationism of the Jeffersonian Republicans, the League of Nations idealism of Woodrow Wilson and the years of Cold War containment – all are framed within an idealistic commitment to ‘liberty’ at home and abroad. It’s a self-satisfied view of America’s global significance which prompts a snort of derision from Chomsky, who takes a ...”

“... Stephen Sondheim is America’s master of musical theatre, as long as we are prepared for the work to be brilliant but not relaxed. His is a voice of solitude struggling to believe in company, and that of a lifelong game-player, so be careful about taking this book at face value as an autobiography, or as giving the whole story ...”

“... ever condemned to our discourses. And so, says Foucault, with the ‘sexual revolution’ itself. Stephen Heath never mentions Foucault. Yet his point in exposing the ‘Sexual Fix’ is almost exactly the same. It is to show that when we believe ourselves at last to be able to express our real selves in sex, when we claim our Right to Sex Happiness, go to ...”

“... understand how one can be enslaved by it without hating it bitterly’). It is typical of A.N. Wilson’s insouciance that the death scene in his Love Unknown is the breeziest possible – the abrupt demise of a character merely inserted so that she can be killed off (though not before she can be mocked). These two novels are more conventionally devised ...”