“... receiving royal assent. Blair was said to have directly intervened to delay its implementation. David Cameron later described FOI as a ‘buggeration factor’ that ‘furs up’ the arteries of government.It’s hardly surprising that FOI is unpopular in Downing Street. The MPs’ expenses scandal emerged from documents prepared in response to an ...”

“... these views – as many did and do. Take the Duke and Duchess of Windsor: King George VI and Queen Elizabeth knew, Harris writes, that the Duke ‘was irresponsible, insensitive, feckless. He never paused to consider the implications of what he said and did. They put nothing past the mesmeric influence on him of “that woman”.’ When it’s another royal ...”

“... littering the sofa tables of the Manchester bourgeosie. In the 1980s, the American poet David Antin charged that ‘anthologies are to poets as the zoo is to animals.’ More recently, Marjorie Perloff called for undergraduates to swear off Evian, in the hope that tap-water drinkers could afford unabridged books rather than hackneyed ...”

“... including the charismatic sculptor and Bloomsbury habitué Stephen Tomlin, and the novelist David Garnett, whose publishing connections were to prove invaluable. Now in her late twenties, Warner was hungry for new experiences. In July 1922, while she was browsing in the cheap section of Whiteley’s Department Store in Bayswater, she noticed a map of ...”

“... Ernst, a friend of Boué’s, he met the Surrealist poets and painters, and with Herbert Read and David Gascoyne, introduced Surrealism to England. He helped persuade Picasso (it didn’t take much) to contribute to the 1936 exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in Piccadilly, which launched the movement in Britain. As Penrose tells it, Eluard had taken ...”

“... shove it into my own prose regardless of how tiresome that is. Take my last book, on the satirist David Sedaris. Not only do you get more Proust than you’d ever care for, you get an awful lot of Sedaris – pure, unadulterated Sedaris. It’s not that I’m lazy. Or rather, it’s not just that I’m lazy. I do much more in Sedaris than quote Sedaris, much ...”

“... been given to the city at the dissolution of the monasteries. A year later, on 3 March 1592, Queen Elizabeth issued a charter incorporating ‘the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity near Dublin’ as ‘the mother of a university’ with the aim of providing ‘education, training and instruction of youths and students in the arts and faculties ... that ...”

“... In the royal numerals case of 1953 – which concerned whether the new queen should style herself Elizabeth II in Scotland, where there had never been an Elizabeth I – the Scottish judge Lord Cooper made the controversial pronouncement that the unlimited sovereignty of parliament was an exclusively English concept, which ...”

“... who became his mistress, partly because of her talents on the stage. He worked closely with Elizabeth Gaskell and the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts. The distress of abused and vulnerable women moved him to pity, and he made energetic attempts to lift prostitutes out of wretchedness, with Burdett-Coutts’s help. He couldn’t tolerate women ...”

“... story and another. Pride and Prejudice has three turning-points, Moretti reckons. In Chapter 3, Elizabeth Bennet meets Darcy, and takes a dislike to him; in Chapter 34, he proposes to her; in Chapter 58, she accepts him. By Moretti’s count, Austen has supplemented these memorable scenes with about 110 episodes in which a fair amount happens, but nothing ...”

“... a case that the novelists had signed up for any of these support systems. The distinction between Elizabeth Bennet and her father is a wide one, in the light of the moral intelligence Jane Austen cares about. This is a truth felt by both characters, by others in the book and by its readers; felt not as a violation of the democratic contract, but as a fact of ...”

“... about fashion and its presentation. Rapture: Art’s Seduction by Fashion since 1970 and David LaChapelle’s photographs both run until 23 December. An exhibition at the V&A of Gianni Versace’s clothes runs until 12 January.* All three tangle with the paradoxes of taste and exclusivity. LaChapelle embraces Truman Capote’s ‘Good taste is the ...”

“... failed to respond to this compliment with any valuable acknowledgment, Thomson, Aaron Hill and David Mallet prepared satirical verses on unsatisfactory patrons to preface the second edition of ‘Winter’. Compton stepped in in time (with civility and 20 guineas), and Thomson judiciously persuaded his friends to tone down their verses, or at least to ...”

“... and varying tensions between private and public religious experience. These include Abel Evans, Elizabeth Rowe, Aaron Hill and Joseph Trapp, and even Robert Lowth, whose The Genealogy of Christ (1729) was written when he was still a schoolboy at Winchester, and the much-derided Sir Richard Blackmore. Johnson later respected Blackmore’s The Creation ...”

“... Singham) and African American studies (Harold Cruse). Robinson’s wife and intellectual partner, Elizabeth, began graduate studies in anthropology there, while Robinson joined the politics department, teaching on the new Black Studies programme, where the visiting speakers included Sylvia Wynter, C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney and James and Grace Lee ...”