“... great man, however bashful, stumbling and dishevelled. It is the work of a tyrannicide subject, in Ian Hamilton’s words, to ‘tyrant delusions’. Lowell was a pacifist who was able, at moments, to praise the ideology of the master race. Mischievously mad or mischievously sane, it was hard to tell which, he once urged companions to exercise a sortes ...”

“... worked so hard to undermine. Meanwhile, on Have I Got News for You and The News Quiz respectively, Ian Hislop (Ardingly, Magdalen) and old Harrovian Francis Wheen tirelessly carry on the work that the Beyond the Fringe team started more than half a century ago.When Have I Got News for You moved to BBC One more than a decade ago it began to lose some of its ...”

“... of images that made no concession to hierarchies of taste. My mother’s copies of Vogue, with black and white photographs by Penn, Avedon and Horst, and drawings by John Ward, Bouché, Eric and the rest, are still my best notion of what a sophisticated magazine should look like. The Post, with its Rockwell covers and advertisements for refrigerators of ...”

“... potential was long-lived and in the last century the greatest exponent of the rhetorical ruin was Ian Hamilton Finlay. Finlay is represented here by four lithographs but the chance to make interesting and much needed connections with the 18th century in his use of neoclassicism and reworking of Piranesi is not taken up. Finlay’s own temple of protest in his ...”

“... a buggy tucked a Union flag around the child’s knees. I asked a young man why he was wearing a black balaclava. ‘’Cos it’s cold,’ he said. Another man said they had to hide their faces because Republicans were taking photographs of the loyalists and passing them on to the police. ‘People have lost their jobs over it,’ he said. A straggle of ...”

“... John McGrath’s play about the exploitation of the Highlands, The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black Black Oil, began its triumphant first tour of Scotland in 1973, engaging audiences in its polemic everywhere it went; no play performed in Scotland can have had a wider political effect. But the villains of the piece were capitalism and greed rather ...”

“... of racial supremacy, but sees many parallels between the two apartheid regimes and thinks that black Africans were more likely to get a fair trial in South Africa than Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Shahak would probably argue that Israel did not need a theory of racial supremacy, because it already had a religious one. In any case, practice is ...”

“... savouring of the land – the ‘landscape’ – must overlap with more workmanlike uses of it. Ian Thompson’s history of the Lake District is grounded almost exclusively in the aesthetic. ‘Since the Lake District is an imaginative construction,’ he argues, ‘it has no real boundaries, physical or historical.’ So he is thinking of it as a region ...”

“... to the further destabilising of any easy notion that fair = white = day = beautiful while dark = black = night = ugly. According to the sonnet, that view is an error, either of outmoded fashion or of inadequate candour: ‘In the old age black was not counted fair,/Or if it were, it bore not beauty’s name;/But now is ...”

“... In 1969, while he was serving a prison sentence for unlawful assembly, Ian Paisley sent this message to his congregation: I rejoice with you in the rich blessings of last weekend. I knew that our faithful God would pour out His bounty. In prayer in this cell I touched the Eternal Throne and had the gracious assurance of answered prayer ...”

“... War from Barcelona (where he gets drunk with Hemingway), is recruited to Naval Intelligence by Ian Fleming and dispatched to Portugal to spy on the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, becomes a prisoner of war in Switzerland, takes a job running an art gallery in New York (which brings him into contact with de Kooning and Pollock), gets caught up in the Biafran ...”

“... each other, except style: sly, fake-lazy, apparently frivolous in the case of Washington, a clever black guy playing other people’s idea of a not so bright black guy; and brisk, smooth and bitchy in the case of Foster, everyone’s idea of what power would look like if women had it. There is some kind of metaphor in the ...”

“... Alexander reminded me that Black once said that he was prepared to let his editors have a completely free hand except on one subject. He forbade attacks on American Presidents in general and President Reagan in particular. Entry for 18 April 1986, Not Many Dead The success of Michael Moore’s film about Roger Smith and General Motors has aroused an envious spirit of emulation in my breast ...”

“... up on innocent people and its widespread bugging of the places where they met. One of these, as Ian Smith suspected during the Rhodesia talks of 1965, was Lancaster House, where many of the negotiations over self-government took place (it was thought the decor would impress the natives). Smith used to meet his aides in the ladies’ lavatory, convinced that ...”

“... years ago J.M. Wallace-Hadrill’s classic textbook on barbarian Europe warned against the ‘black untruth’ of claiming a fundamental opposition between kings and their aristocracy. On Charlemagne’s grandson Dr McKitterick writes: ‘Whereas the lay aristocracy was divided in its loyalty to Charles the Bald, the bishops and the church backed him ...”