“... identified with the century itself. Her circumstances were of course relatively comfortable. Kenneth Clark made sure that the royal air-raid shelter was tastefully decorated with Dutch old masters. Nevertheless the aftermath of war left her tired and the next few years of austerity and reconstruction were ‘hard & grinding’. Despite her ultimate ...”

“... including those, such as snakes, which are generally feared. Girl with a kitten and Girl with a white dog are among his best-known early works and two of his most successful recent paintings, entitled, significantly. Double Portrait and Triple Portrait, in fact show only one girl, with a single whippet in the former and a brace of whippets in the latter. As ...”

“... Their relations are not sexual but wholly collegial. The out-of-control independent counsel is not Kenneth Starr but a posse partly made up of the self-appointed scientific fraud-busters Walter Stewart and Ned Feder and their patron, the Democratic Congressman John Dingell. For the excellent Linda Tripp with her concealed tape-recorder read Imanishi-Kari’s ...”

“... the eloquent intervals, the airy combination of dusty pink, chestnut brown, pale blue and white: all mark this painting as the earliest and perhaps the most interesting example of Piero’s influence on a great modern artist. In Young Spartans, which belongs to the same years and is now in the National Gallery, the group of elders in the distance ...”

“... Now, just as an indication of how the party’s changing, Wilfred got selected for Chippenham – white, middle-class, you know, deepest Wiltshire. And Wilfred tooled up to the selection meeting, wearing his jeans and an open-necked shirt, and just took them by storm. And they love him.’ ‘Do you want to meet Wilfred?’ the press officer ...”

“... in the 1920s; the Hogarth Press published two pamphlets on film by the music critic Eric Walter White; and Roger Fry, in ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’ (1909), mentioned that it was only when he watched a ‘cinematograph’ that he noticed the bizarre habit people have of turning a full circle when they get off a train. In ‘The Cinema’, Woolf pays much ...”

“... become jammed at an angle to the wall. She caught a glint of knives and forks, the blue and white fragments of a serving dish.’ She and her husband, Paul Tarrant, find temporary lodgings and then within days that place is gone too. So there they were, for the second time in a week, homeless … the newly risen sun glinted on the silver barrage ...”

“... including one from a submarine, most of which were successful. According to Gary Samore, the White House’s chief nuclear negotiator during Obama’s first term, North Korea is technologically more advanced than Iran.North Korea has taken note of what happened to Iraq and Libya after they renounced nuclear weapons: the US took military action against ...”

“... Sometimes that, too, can lead to retrospective wishful thinking. When I was in Germany last month, Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V was showing everywhere, and had clearly caused something of a stir. More than one German asked me whether it should not be seen as part of a long-standing English vision of European unity. I had to confess that I had never before ...”

“... authority: the result, an overwhelming endorsement of existing ILEA policies, should provide Kenneth Baker with plenty to think about. And for thousands of students there is, as always at this time of year, the pressure of public examinations. This tangled web of issues can be looked at through the prism of literature teaching. Since assessment is the ...”

“... about race’. Roussel’s long poem Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique has done better in English. Kenneth Koch translated the third canto into rhyming alexandrines in 1964, and Ian Monk the whole poem into pentameter couplets in 2004. But Mark Ford’s facing-pages edition is easily the most comprehensive and reader-friendly to date. The author of the ...”

“... Heath. The diversity has continued: later members have included ostensible one-nation Tories – Kenneth Clarke, Michael Heseltine, Ian Gilmour – but also Keith Joseph and Nicholas Ridley. The politics of the Tory left were actually advanced in various factional groupings and dining clubs, such as Nick’s Diner, the Lollards and the Tory Reform Group.The ...”

“... Folkestone, Dover. The same grid of cars. The same concern about getting into the right stream. White cliffs – with visible evidence of wartime activity, tunnels, huts, gun emplacements. Security (discreet but firm). The dizzy sense of not being where you are; exhausted from travel and anticipating more of the same. Customs paranoia. Worries about having ...”

“... bizarre to go early one morning to look at the nondescript and wholly undefended villa from which Kenneth Bigley, Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley had just been kidnapped by ten masked men. Could they have taken seriously the line pumped out by the White House and Downing Street that the dangers of Iraq were being ...”

“... to convince his boss of the success of one of his skin grafts, a graft from a black animal onto a white mouse, by touching up the graft with a black felt pen. One can imagine the surprise of a technician upon finding out that this particular skin graft was soluble in alcohol. Summerlin was suspended instantly from work on full pay ($40,000), ostensibly to ...”