“... intended for the Royal Academy – is made clear by the trouble and expense Payne Knight took to include works by (or supposedly by) Michelangelo. These were not to his taste, but he recognised their importance. The exhibition includes The Holy Family with the Infant St John, the first drawing by Michelangelo to ...”

“... cabinet has that kind of pull, and the ones who are spoken of in the same manner – Donald Dewar, John Smith – are as dead as the Scottish kings. In the end Sheridan won his case and relieves the News of the World of £200,000. The fate of possible perjurors is still unknown, but it will be some time before the country is so riveted by a trial, one that has ...”

“... who showed themselves to be the intellectual heirs of the didactic Victorian tradition. John Berger, in the New Statesman, complained that the show demonstrated that ‘industrial capitalism has now destroyed the standards of Popular Taste and substituted for them standards of gentility, Bogus-Originality and competitive cultural ...”

“... many or most of us nurse comparable sensitivities to those of the young man whose words Martin took from an internet discussion of synaesthesia. (Mine are vegetal too: I have a thing about rhubarb leaves, not to speak of certain stalky umbellifers – cow parsley and the like. I blame the memory of frilled and succulent Triffids in a television adaptation ...”

“... was not the first. Another society was founded under Elizabeth I. But her successor, James I, ‘took a little Mislike’ to it and it fizzled out. Charles I made the antiquary Robert Cotton close his famous library, thinking it seditious. Suspected at various times of anti-Stuart sympathies, closet Catholicism, republicanism, even as late as 1797 the ...”

“... as a bit too cuddly and open, and makes you long for the days of secrecy and high adventure before John Major passed the 1994 Intelligence Services Act, which not only publicly acknowledged the existence of SIS for the first time, to absolutely no one’s surprise, but also made it subject to Parliamentary oversight. Or it may be that it strikes you as a load ...”

“... Britain’s input was increasingly marginal, especially when in the later stages the Pentagon took over from the State Department, the FCO’s main interlocutor. British officials recommended that there should be no dismantling of Iraq’s governmental and security structures and had not expected that the US would disband the Iraqi army and dismiss ...”

“... When Hans Schmoller​ first saw a copy of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing – the book was published in 1972 – he hurled it across the room. Schmoller, who had succeeded Jan Tschichold as designer at Penguin in 1949, was a subtle practitioner of traditional book design. His pages were balanced, proper and elegant ...”

“... doctrine definitively trumpeted by Milton and Locke, and knocked into some sort of final shape by John Stuart Mill? Even before you get to today’s remix of the debate, you cannot help noticing two features of it. First, the zealots today are no longer the progressives on the left – liberals, socialists, trade unionists. Instead they are predominantly on ...”

“... his friends play pool, I challenged them to a game. I beat them all, one after another. A friend took me to a local snooker club. The green baize stretched away under the hanging lamps like the pitch at Wembley, full of strange promise. The competitive edge I thought I’d lost in the haze of motherhood came back. Someone mentioned money. I picked up a cue ...”

“... people, tolerant, patient and generous. Traditional values lost much of their force. Other values took their place. Imperial greatness was on the way out: the welfare state was on the way in. The British Empire declined: the condition of the people improved. Few now sang ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Few even sang ‘England Arise’. England had risen all ...”

“... have led to the bizarre and grotesque spectacle of 6 January.To call the explosion of the mob that took over the Capitol building an attempted coup, or an insurrection, is unfair to the plotters of coups and insurrections. Like the man who egged them on in a speech that morning – and who had spent the last two months refusing to concede the election, going ...”

“... called ‘my pain’, was a poet, playwright, pianist, composer and actress, and these activities took her away from home for long and irregular periods of time. When she rematerialised, we had long goodnights during which, as she sang to me, I undid her hair so that it fell over her shoulders. She used to parade naked in front of me, and would tell me (for ...”

“... the one hand, he was a kind of comedian, a learned buffoon, a butt for courtly wits and poets like John Donne and Ben Jonson, who both knew him well. On the other hand, he was the immensely tough and courageous traveller, whose remarkable journeys through Europe and Asia were made almost entirely on foot. This is the boast entailed in his favourite description ...”

“... campaigns, especially in Kenya, substantial numbers of unlawful killings of civilians took place, even if there is no credible evidence of anything on the scale of My Lai. We may go further, and notice that during and after the Second World War, scarcely any Allied soldiers, sailors or airmen were prosecuted for war crimes, though there was ample ...”