“... gold teeth in the brutal mouths of tycoons; the newspaper obituaries of dead children – he rose to heaven, he joined the angels – and their tragic white coffins; baroque mouldings; excrescences carved in granite on the vulgar façades of banks; coat and hat racks made with the horns and hooves of deer or mountain goats; coats of arms for common last ...”

“... and anxious to extend its power over policy, ministerial appointments and foreign affairs. Tension rose throughout 1992 and reached a climax in March 1993 when an impeachment motion was tabled and failed only narrowly to achieve a two-thirds majority. In April, a referendum was put to the Russian people: did they support the President, did they support his ...”

“... would be ‘honest thief-takers’, not the kind in The Beggar’s Opera, or in Fielding’s novel Jonathan Wild, who colluded with criminals until it became expedient to hand them over to justice. In the early years of the runners some worked as prison turnkeys; others had unexpected former careers: one was an ex-pickpocket, and one a highwayman who had ...”

“... Taking advantage of the power of office is more common than not, as the modern morality tale of Jonathan Aitken reminds us. But Chinese corruption has been accompanied by dynamic growth, Indian by a liberalisation of the economy and the development of some highly advanced technology. In Russia, corruption chokes growth and the few efficient parts of the ...”

“... abuse which were the lot of the embattled satirist. Johnson had heard the son of Pope’s friend Jonathan Richardson give an account of the poet greeting an attack by Colley Cibber, who was to be crowned King of the Dunces in the final version of The Dunciad. I have heard Mr Richardson relate that he attended his father the painter on a visit, when one of ...”

“... 2’ in History is a 14-line redaction of that, ending ‘my namesake, not the last Caligula’ (Jonathan Raban once suggested that Lowell’s idea of ‘revision’ was to throw on more negatives). As for ‘Caligula 1’ – that’s a revision of a translation of Baudelaire’s ‘Spleen’ that first appeared in Imitations. And so on, and so on, and so ...”

“... the ‘B’ in the ‘ABC’ industrial region surrounding São Paulo and the place where he rose to prominence, challenging the military dictatorship by leading strikes and helping to found the PT – the Workers’ Party. His supporters, wearing the party’s red T-shirts, had unfurled a huge banner reading ‘Elections without Lula Are Fraud’ and ...”

“... Paul Ferdonnet and André Olbrecht, who recorded programmes in Stuttgart; in the States, ‘Tokyo Rose’, Mildred Gillars (‘Axis Sally’) and Ezra Pound, who was indicted for broadcasting from Italy; in Britain, John Amery and P.G. Wodehouse, who was cold-shouldered for giving a jaunty talk about life in his internment camp. Lord Haw-Haw was the most ...”

“... however, it was the Lion defying the Eagle – practically, it was JOHN BULL DEFYING BROTHER JONATHAN. A committee of prominent citizens, however, led by Washington Irving, persuaded Macready not to cut short his engagement: steps would be taken to make sure that there were no more unpleasant incidents. At all costs, the honour and civility of New York ...”

“... who had been heavily pregnant at William’s funeral – had given her baby the middle name Rose. She had placed a rose in William’s coffin. Christine gave me a copy of what she called ‘William’s story’, written on seven A4 sheets of paper in an erratic mix of capital and lower-case letters.Christine is dead ...”

“... Brick, has vanished into the vault, as have Noah Baumbach’s unfinished pilot for a TV version of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, starring Ewan McGregor, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Greta Gerwig, a Ridley Scott-directed pilot for a rejected show called The Vatican, and many others.After Chase shot the pilot for The Sopranos, ten months went by before HBO got ...”

“... started fining parents for picking up their children late, the incidence of late pick-ups actually rose. As that example suggests, upping the opportunity cost of a particular behaviour by fines may fail to deter it if the fine shifts its context from social co-operation to commerce. But then the externality – here, the higher incidence of late pick-ups ...”

“... writer. So if Rick Moody tells us that Lydia Davis is ‘the best prose stylist in America’, and Jonathan Franzen that ‘few writers now working make the words on the page matter more,’ does this make her better or worse equipped to render the best prose stylist of 19th-century France into 21st-century American English? Davis’s stories, typically from ...”

“... his own words, a ‘visionary’ speech, and he wrote it all himself, in the study overlooking the Rose Garden at Chequers, a single draft composed with little hesitation and no agonising. While he wrote it, he picked up from the desk a silver and gold inkstand given to Chamberlain in 1937, with an inscription that reads: ‘To stand on the ancient ways, to ...”

“... already done: by Gill on ‘Salisbury Plain’, by Butler on ‘The Ruined Cottage’, by Jacobus, Jonathan Wordsworth and others. Elsewhere he is less successful. His history is more literary-biographical than intellectual, and he passes by without comment significant work in intellectual history. James Chandler’s Wordsworth’s Second Nature (1984) goes ...”