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“... been, to say nothing of many a lesser figure. In what might be called the peripheral stakes Dylan Thomas and even David Jones have had more attention in some quarters – in the case of Dylan Thomas, with a wild publicity which has had little enough to do with his work. MacDiarmid, it is ...”

“... with the name. Lars Trier, a boy from Denmark, went to film school and changed his name to the more aristocratic Lars von Trier. In Trier on von Trier the question of the name opens the account of the director’s life. ‘I started using the name again at film school, because it seemed the most provocative thing I could do,’ von Trier explains. ‘No ...”

“... somewhat wider historical interest is the fact – which everyone knows in general but which it is more difficult to imagine concretely – that one could then quite unremarkably drive from door to door in Central London and park one’s car outside one’s club. This is the world in which Sassoon is moving around in the years recorded in this third volume of ...”

“... For Sir Thomas Browne it was a commonplace that ‘the number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live.’ But this is no longer necessarily true, as has been pointed out in these pages before now: there may be more people living now than all the people who have ever died ...”

“... seeks analogies between Germany’s experience and possible ways of recuperating the more or less unredeemed American past. What Nietzsche called ‘monumental’ history extracts from the past a particular great and worthy deed and uses it as a model: by showing that a thing was ‘at least possible once’ we see that it ‘may well again be ...”

“... of the so-called Reformation Parliament, national business, derived from London interests. Sir Thomas More’s repressive reaction to the early Protestant movement was focused on London, as was Queen Anne Boleyn’s promotion of it. The fall of the reforming statesman Thomas Cromwell happened in London, with ...”

“... in another the early drafts of his great book, The Everlasting Man; while in a drawer I found more personal things: Chesterton’s passport, his pen, his spectacles, a Papal Medal, and his rosary.’ One may be edified, I suppose, by the Papal Medal and the rosary while at the same time feeling that early drafts of Chesterton’s most important work of ...”

“... century’. Oh no it isn’t. Al-Hariri, author of the Maqamat (literally ‘Standings’, but more usually translated as ‘Sessions’) died in 1122. The painting is actually by the 13th-century artist Yahya ibn Mahmud al-Wasiti. Turning to the back of the book, one finds an elegant painting of a seated Arab. According to the caption, this is a portrait ...”

“... much of what seemed so important at the time. Both the books discussed here describe the strike as more like a civil war than an industrial dispute. It began in March 1984 and ended a year later, after a majority of the miners had gone back to work over the preceding months, disillusioned, scared by the violence, or starved back (miners got little strike pay ...”

“... in 1948 demonstrated his political nerve against the favourite and eventual loser of that year, Thomas E. Dewey. The implied comparison, in 2020, was with the passive, careful, non-reactive campaign of Joe Biden, who arranged to be caught on camera in a face mask, projecting grandfatherly reassurance from his basement headquarters. Biden’s mental debility ...”

“... greatest of all abilities is to be able to ‘draft around’ a problem. The Right to Know is much more than a good read and ephemeral wonder: it will, I believe, be required study for graduates, undergraduates, journalists and many others interested in the government of Britain. In particular, I am agog to know what the readers of the London Review are going ...”

“... duplication in the purchase of books. I also saw obvious practical problems with the scheme. More than a third of the Warburg library’s acquisitions come from gift or exchange, and most of the rest are bought with our own resources rather than public funds. And the institute has always made a practice of employing scholar-librarians, actively engaged ...”

“... the most important impact over the years on how we think and talk about law.’ Next to Clarence Thomas, Scalia is the most conservative justice on the Supreme Court. Kagan is a Democrat and, we’re told, a liberal. Was she including herself in this claim? If so, how exactly has Scalia influenced her? If not, what does she think of his influence on ...”

“... to knit again/This scattered corn into one mutual sheaf.’ Of course ‘scattered corn’ is far more likely to suggest the grain of Shakespeare’s native Warwickshire than the rare exotic his contemporaries called ‘Indian corn’ and while Griffiths’s identification of the other three figures as John Gerard, his patron Lord Burghley and his ...”

“... claim true. But it is a safe inference that his views on the question diverge from those of Thomas Jefferson. What, if anything, does make the claim simply true must be the rationally-interpreted place of human beings within the order (or disorder) of nature. If all human beings do simply have rights, that is to say, these rights must be natural ...”