“... of what Castiglione meant, though he does identify the ancient and medieval source from which he drew his ideals, his terminology, the larger shape and many smaller passages of his work. For meaning, Burke substitutes reception: not what Castiglione had in mind but what his readers found in him. Burke argues, convincingly, that watching a succession of ...”

“... mortality was linked to the day of your birth. I was playing hearts in the student union when they drew the numbers. Mine turned out to be 254. It was widely figured they’d never draft past number 150. I was to be spared. I had a future. I wanted to be a poet. I had discovered Yeats. I wanted to be Simon and Garfunkel. I could play the guitar. I considered ...”

“... they serve only the luxury end of the market. The equivalent of the Grand Tourists whom Ingres drew in Rome now have their own cameras and portraiture’s death by a million snapshots has freed painters from the burden of face-painting about which they so often complained. The trouble is finding another genre which can make the same demands on the ...”

“... Order and Disorder, Mortlock published a sermon in which Stillingfleet attacked dissenters, which drew from Owen A brief vindication of Nonconformists from the charge of schism, which Stillingfleet countered in A Discourse of the Unreasonableness of Separation, published as usual by Mortlock. Norbrook surmises that Mortlock printed Order and Disorder because ...”

“... queues had stretched out into the street. A demonstration in his support in the London docklands drew a bigger crowd than the one that welcomed Garibaldi. On his West Country tour, up to four thousand people crowded into Bristol Temple Meads station to catch a glimpse of him. The funambulist Blondin offered to carry him across Niagara Falls, though the ...”

“... of Soweto, outside Johannesburg. I sat with Lafont in his ill-lit office at the back of St Philip Neri, his parish church. The adjacent bedroom had been turned into a drop-in dormitory for young boys and as the night drew on it filled up. At regular intervals the office door would be pushed ajar and a bashful face ...”

“... proclaims the contrary. So does the concluding line – ‘Never such innocence again’ – of Philip Larkin’s 1960 poem ‘MCMXIV’, invoking the summer haze, the ‘dark-haired children at play’, the      moustached archaic faces Grinning as if it were all An August Bank Holiday lark ... of the war’s early days. No one thought it would be a ...”

“... possessive woman I have ever known’. She did not get what she wanted. Macmillan’s solicitor Philip Frere pointed out that divorce would be fatal for his political career and recommended a ‘west wing-east wing’ solution, traditional among the estranged upper classes who had houses large enough for the purpose. Until she died in 1966 – suddenly, of ...”

“... the 1990s as CEO of Halliburton, the world’s largest oil and gas services company, Dick Cheney drew $44 million in salary from an outfit that on his own Brechtian admission saw war as offering ‘growth opportunities’. Millions of dollars more in ‘deferred compensation’ were earmarked to tide him over during his time in government. In December 2003 ...”

“... in Bergamo about the progress of work for the church of Santa Maria Maggiore. And the will he drew up in Venice in 1546 contained autobiographical material. These documents suggest a personality which Peter Humfrey in his 1997 study of Lotto described as ‘introspective, hypersensitive, often prickly and quick to take offence; but also generous in his ...”

“... it didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on in the country. Lacking local knowledge, it drew parallels with Russia, Eastern Europe, China and Korea, portraying events ‘as part of a global pattern of communist activity’. An unredacted part of Cullather’s book records that the coup was thought to be both ‘more ambitious and more thoroughly ...”

“... respond – from want of contact and knowledge, not desire – to Chris herself. More and more he drew on his own imaginative invention and on literary analogues.’ Haffenden’s conclusion, however, that they are ‘at worst ... enormously self-engrossed’, should be qualified. When Berryman is describing a real meeting, as at the end of sonnet 42, the ...”

“... conversation) that he has never been introduced to Woolf’s work: ‘My book’s sub-plot is Philip K. Dick, sales-talk, Hollywood and schitzophrenia.’ So I’m forced to describe Woolf in terms of Dick’s excellent ‘straight’ novels of the sliding life in the Western States, In Milton Lumky Territory and Humpty Dumpty in Oakland. The keenest ...”

“... practical exponent and the major intellectual theorist of a war on Iraq, Kenneth Pollack and Philip Bobbitt, are former ornaments of the Clinton regime. But as substantial policy contrasts tend to dwindle in Western political systems, symbolic differences of style and image can easily acquire, in compensation, a hysterical rigidity. The Kulturkampf ...”

“... with Scott Fitzgerald), a ‘somewhat rackety woman’, and a character at the Oxford of Philip Larkin’s novel Jill is said to be ‘an aggressively rackety minor-public-school undergraduate’. ‘Rackety types have a link with people of the intellect,’ Powell writes in his notebook, and his novels are full of quite unintellectual types, usually ...”