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“... the second part of a superb and definitive biography, and by these studies of Edward Gibbon, Thomas Babington Macaulay and John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, pioneer volumes in Weidenfeld and Nicolson’s new ‘Historians on Historians’ series. As their resonant names suggest, these men were the very antithesis of poor, cloistered, threadbare ...”

“... which introduces a functional analysis of the central section of Stravinsky’s In Memoriam Dylan Thomas. The index to this material occupies a further four and a half pages, and contains such fascinating entries as ‘sadism, Webern’s in-turned’. The book is generally superlative in tone, and Keller’s fondness for verbal inflation leads him down some ...”

“... eleven million cars a year and had just overtaken its deadly rival Toyota as the most popular car brand in the world.The head to head with Toyota was at the core of what was to be VW’s disaster. As the 21st century went on, it became increasingly clear that everybody in the fossil fuel business had to start thinking about ways of getting into clean, or at a ...”

“... curiously, only 21 are included here) have been compared by Robert Nye to the poems written by Thomas Hardy after the death of his wife, and by Jonathan Raban to In Memoriam. The subject is a precarious one for poetry, and Dunn has not always succeeded in avoiding the pitfalls. Poems like ‘Dining’ and ‘Arrangements’ are dangerously direct; Dunn’s ...”

“... Celtic protest, just as it did in the late 19th century. What is new, however, is the Thatcherite brand of radicalism which has also worked to divide. The BBC, previously the purveyor of a truly nationwide public culture, has been systematically undermined. The Civil Service, formerly a component of the powerful myth of British official impartiality and ...”

“... stage further, for his subject, Lord Castlereagh (1769-1822), constitutes a major obstacle to his brand of revisionism. Was black reaction in the marrow of Unionism from the very start? After all, Castlereagh, one of the architects of the British-Irish Union of 1800, later played a directing part in the Tory regime which, in the years immediately following ...”

“... patrician anticlericalism which distinguished his more progressive – because freethinking – brand of conservatism from what he perceived as the type of right-wingery that might lapse all too easily into a fascistic authoritarianism. Trevor-Roper’s very individual and historically informed reading of politics is one of the running themes of his letters ...”

“... a nation’. Most young nations carry false birth certificates, either some teleologically-twisted brand of history which proves that Slobodnian independence was the inevitable outcome of the dialectics of progress, or else – and not infrequently – literal forgeries. Look at the Libuse manuscripts, forged by a 19th-century Prague archivist to prove that a ...”

“... Hollinghurst’s fondness for triads of the adjective-adjective-noun kind, on the model of Thomas Gray’s ‘mute inglorious Milton’. Nothing is more lyrically English than this smooth cluster, and Hollinghurst’s ability to spool these triplets throughout the book is marvellous. But they appear so often that they begin to act ...”

“... Mann’s affidavit, which stated that he was on his way to Princeton to meet up with his father Thomas, and said he was ‘honoured to make the acquaintance of the son of so great a man’. Varian Fry was a stiff, rather priggish man, a spoilt only child who manipulated his parents with fake illnesses, was bullied at school and became known as a prankster ...”

“... and gives the novel a starred review, praising its ‘charming’ recombination of the styles of Thomas Pynchon and Boris Vian and its ‘tender’, ‘childlike’ depiction of heterosexual love. Jack figures the Kirkus reviewer must be a woman, probably studying French, unduly influenced by Will’s touched-up author photo. Then comes a review in the New ...”

“... Prescott when he punched a demonstrator, suggests something of this tautological quality. This brand of liberty is not in principle opposed to authority, not least because without its minatory presence it would have nothing to grumble about. Even so, it keeps a wary eye on the potential insolence of power. It is peaceable but nonconformist. English freedom ...”

“... Representatives, which means that the often mentioned potential for Trump to poison the national brand is grossly exaggerated. The source of Republican national power is Republican local power, which will be hard to shake until after the 2020 census, no matter how badly they behave. In Wisconsin, the Republican trifecta has allowed the party over the last ...”

“... seem musty, costumed, made-up. Anyone who finds his poems flat or prosaic might consider Edward Thomas’s defence of Robert Frost: ‘if his work were printed [as prose] it would have little in common with the kind of prose that runs to blank verse ... It is poetry because it is better than prose.’ A New Path to the Waterfall is poetry because it is ...”

“... Michel Foucault up the wall. For all its carnivalesque cavortings, body talk is thus our latest brand of repression; and the Post-Modern cult of pleasure, not least in its Parisian variants, is a very solemn, high-toned affair. Either, like Peter Brooks in Body Work, you write about this bizarre stuff in an impeccably academic idiom, thus risking an ...”