“... codes were second nature. Her greatest friend, Bessie Parkes, and her drawing teacher, Eliza Fox, were both daughters of famous Unitarian public men. Robinson admits her surprise on discovering that ‘libertarianism was accommodated so readily’ in an era she had previously seen as ‘stiflingly straitlaced and intolerant’.Unitarians thought ...”

“... depressed.Lazare’s predictions today seem understated. The ‘demagogues of the airwaves’ on Fox News, notably Tucker Carlson, not only fan the resentments of their audiences, they now help steer the Republican Party and influenced the policy-making of the Trump administration. Politics has become so constrained that both Democrats and Republicans dream ...”

“... have not a great deal of ingenuity themselves.’ One of these dull elves was Austen’s nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, whose 1870 Memoir of Jane Austen captured the public’s imagination with its portrayal of Austen as the masterful miniaturist. Like her novels, Austen has always been read in different ways and Austen-Leigh took full advantage of the ...”

“... Daguerre announced his ability to ‘seize the light’, a claim soon rephrased by William Henry Fox Talbot as the art of ‘fixing a shadow’. As for 1865, it’s the year that marks, along with much else, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the end of the American Civil War, and the inauguration of photography’s increasingly public role in the ...”

“... of ours in Oxfordshire, where the hunt and the motor car between them have wiped out most of the fox population, leaving rabbits to proliferate. I fetched him back six frozen rabbits in a holdall – a frozen rabbit, I can tell you, is almost a yard long from tip to tip – and Romano made casseroles with tomato and thyme which the lunchtime customers fell ...”

“... the EU ‘should be one of the easiest in human history’, as Farage’s fellow-traveller Liam Fox put it last year. The security of food and medical supplies, keeping civilian aircraft flying in and out of Britain, the jobs of hundreds of thousands of people in the car industry, peace in Ireland, staffing the health service – bureaucratic ...”

“... have the idea that Bush’s delivery is really an impersonation of Ronald Reagan impersonating James Stewart and John Wayne, but I think that elevates him too much: his mentality is clouded with lesser subtleties, occluded with hungers of a more brutal, mercenary, low-budget kind. He has the effective salesman’s knowledge of how to play with people’s ...”

“... the only man in the kingdom who could have played it’. But a more cold-eyed scholar, Alistair Fox, has written that it ‘gives evidence of a political endeavour in More so subtle and devious as to set not only Machiavelli, but also Richard III and Iago to school’. When More could not win an argument, he slid into puerility. In The Supplication of ...”

“... as a doomsday scenario the bleached teeth, melodramatic behaviour and detachment from reality of Fox News anchors, or even the less repulsive but undeniably smug Beltway smarm of MSNBC. You might object that at least these journalists wear their political affiliations openly and that Piers Morgan is already importing the model of culture war masquerading as ...”

“... sniggers of critical derision (‘dire nonsense’, thought the Observer’s finely named A.H. Fox Strangways), had created the climate of its own prosperity.That derision played a part in Britten’s decision to leave the country in 1939. Frank Bridge came to see the boat off at Southampton, and handed Britten his own Giussani viola, and a letter, with ...”

“... the scale of the thing dwarfs every preceding instance. On 20 December the secretary of defence, James Mattis, resigned after Trump tweeted his vow to withdraw from Syria. This led to a reiteration, by policy experts along with many Democrats and almost all the mainstream media, of the moral importance of staying in Syria. Solemn admonitions were combined ...”

“... go through these doors in a weekend, many may dimly remember that it was the owner of this club, James Palumbo, who gave a car, a Rover, to Peter Mandelson MP, to help the cause. It is here, at the suitably messianic Ministry of Sound, that the Use Your Vote campaign is organised. Much of the music inside will come from Creation Records, the label which ...”

“... Prominent Lebanese Americans like Ralph Nader, Michael DeBakey, William Peter Blatty, Senator James Abourezk and General John Abizaid rarely visited Lebanon itself. As attached as some were to their grandmothers’ cooking and to bits of folklore, they preferred to keep the country at a distance. Anthony Shadid was an exception. As he wrote in this ...”

“... Flannery O’Connor began in the autumn of 1957, is a 25-year-old would-be writer called Asbury Fox, who has been forced to return from Manhattan to the family farm in rural Georgia on account of a mysterious illness from which he believes he is dying. His path-breaking play on ‘the Negro’ has not yet been written; he has, however, completed a letter to ...”

“... diplomatic intrigues, particularly when they involve characters as colourful as Edgar Hoover or James Angleton. Wright describes how Angleton ingeniously contrived to enjoy simultaneously his three main hobbies of drinking, smoking and fishing. Having bought a stretch of river, he buried bottles of Jack Daniels at regular intervals in the river bed, so that ...”