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“... discussed at any length: Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Lionel Trilling and Judith Shklar. It is a small sample from which to distil generalisations about the moral failings of an age, but that is what Moyn sets out to do.His approach to their writings is prosecutorial, one charge being that they provided ‘a rationale for a Cold War struggle that ...”

“... month his wife had been arrested by the Vichy police and deported to the German death camps. Their small daughter, Claire, who was saved by neighbours, this summer saw Maurice Papon, who was responsible for her mother’s deportation, released after less than three years in prison. On a summer’s day in 1944, with France newly liberated, Henri ...”

“... Kingsley Amis seemed shrewdly chosen to forestall the ‘Lord Archer wins the lottery’, ‘lucky Stephen King’, or ‘not more cash for Martin’ reactions. Conservative values and Good English (virtues that Sir Kingsley and the Times share) would be the prime beneficiaries of the shattered book agreement. Inside, the op-ed page was dominated by a gloating ...”

“... public time as a discipline. And in an exceptionally wide-ranging foray into intellectual history, Stephen Kern explores the ways in which private notions of time (and space) were profoundly altered and extended in the thirty years before the First World War. The scope of these books is very different: one straddles the centuries; the other delves into ...”

“... voiced against the French Communist Party, make an affirmative answer distressingly plausible. Stephen Wilson’s large and learned book, in which he studies the political, social and intellectual aspects of anti-semitism in France at the end of the 19th century, is therefore very timely, as is the reprinting of Dreyfus’s recollections of his conviction ...”

“... As I was reading Stephen Greenblatt’s biography of Shakespeare on the train there was a woman sitting near me doing a deal on the phone. She was getting agitated. ‘But I have to transfer the money to Mr Shakespeare himself,’ she said. ‘No … Listen, I really need to speak to Mr Shakespeare. Can you put me through? Hello? … Hello?’ Then the line went dead ...”

“... to this anthology, which could have been presented in quite a different way. Edna O’Brien’s small-town girl was fascinated, as a child, by the two grotesque Miss Connors, Miss Lucy and drunken Miss Amy. When she comes home on an awkward visit from England with her short-tempered husband, he makes their little boy return Miss Amy’s gift of sweeties ...”

“... species, we may suppose, since intercourse between the two has not so far proved fruitful. Stephen Gould’s contribution to this last debate is to open one or two coffins containing the scientific skeletons of the past with the purpose of nailing down the lids even more securely. From the point of view of the modern debate, they were better left ...”

“... as ‘a liar and a cheat’. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, one of the Guardian’s main rivals, Stephen Glover, a journalist of rare perspicacity, sets out the familiar ‘one rotten apple’ view: ‘Mr Hamilton appears to me a rather obnoxious little man, but he is just that, a little man, surrounded by other little men who have also received money from ...”

“... its beak was ‘crooked’ or ‘streight’; then, if straight, was the fowl large, medium or small in size? If medium, was its beak strong and thick, or short and small? Through this process of elimination, the reader would eventually be guided towards the smallest groupings, with the final criterion prompting ...”

“... reception of The Orators when it appeared in May 1932. By the end of that year, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Geoffrey Grigson, Michael Roberts, Bonamy Dobrée, John Hayward and Graham Greene had nominated Auden as the new voice. The six odes and the epilogue of The Orators, Greene said, justified Auden’s ‘being named in the same breath as ...”

“... it is just where we would expect the words ‘Aet. suae’ next to the sitter’s age, and maybe a small heraldic badge to indicate his lineage. This is the painting which has become known as the Sanders portrait, after Thomas Sanders, the man who in 1908 took it to Marion Henry Spielmann, author of the pioneering Portraits of Shakespeare (1907), claiming that ...”

“... for concept albums full of ‘great mates’ from the 1970s; songs about Bigfoot and snowmen and Stephen Fry reciting daffy gibberish; unadventurous marking-time remixes of old material. Someone, in sum, who displayed every symptom of having let zero new music into his manor house for twenty or thirty years. I’m not convinced our huffy Rock Bloke would get ...”

“... the new imperialists would have to renounce their dream of developing a whole new generation of small first-strike nuclear weapons. Another reason for the administration’s instinctive unilateralism is that multilateral instruments are not always as useful as their proponents contend. On this subject Mann is commendably even-handed. The world’s gravest ...”

“... I imagined would be totally dark, to cure the fault. He took me down to the cellar, but it had two small windows, and when I emerged a few minutes later, explaining that unfortunately it was not dark enough for my purpose, he seemed slightly offended: so his cellar wasn’t good enough. He handed us our drinks rather grumpily. I asked about the possibility of ...”