“... set within a shopping mall, Grand Central, which blurs into another shopping mall, the Bull Ring. Richard Vinen, writing the first serious history of Birmingham in a long while, is aware of how hard it is to pin the city down, to explain what it is or what it is for. Planners in the 1960s, he says, ‘were sometimes perplexed as to why Birmingham had been ...”

“... Freud. But it is also because a past is not a thing to be discovered. As the analyst said, and as Richard Rorty has been saying in this journal, it is not discovered but made. Ronald Fraser was not trying to determine, like certain historians of former times, what his past ‘really was’. But there is some question of a pathogenic secret, of the recovery of ...”

“... turn one of them off. It’s a good service, a model, with none of the speakers – his two sons, Richard Eyre and Robert Bathurst – outstaying their welcome and Ben vividly recalled.Bathurst is particularly good, reading a Betjeman poem about golf, following it up with a very funny (and almost better) poem in parody by Ben himself. Since I know him chiefly ...”

“... in Weatherby’s word, being ‘typed’. In 1954, she broke her contract with Twentieth Century Fox and Darryl Zanuck, leaving Hollywood for New York to set up her own film company with the photographer Milton Greene (she made sure she controlled 51 per cent of the stock). It was a scandal. Although the project was short-lived, she was at that moment the ...”

“... Madison Square Garden there were hundreds of police wielding plastic handcuffs. Above the crowd, Fox News was advertising itself and its advertisers on a giant screen. The protesters howled up abuse as they passed underneath. A certain mica sparkled through the atmosphere of the Republican National Convention: it was the notion that a lack of patriotism was ...”

“... inquiries in London might damage his News Corp business in the US, where his holdings included the Fox TV network. He and his fellow directors stood to be prosecuted in the UK under the 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and in the US under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Having covered up its activities for years, News Corp reached for the ...”

“... the Lamprey family in Surfeit of Lampreys, published 25 years earlier. (‘God bless my soul!’ Fox said. ‘Your memory!’) Even in Last Ditch (1977), it turns out quite casually that Julia Pharamond was née Lamprey. ‘“I think long ago you met some of my relations.” “I believe I did,” said Alleyn.’But for the most part, the world of the ...”

“... at one degree of separation from Donald Trump. He has been interviewed by Tucker Carlson on Fox News, and posted photos of himself with Donald Trump Jr, Nigel Farage and Alex Jones. He has received a warm welcome on some of the podcasts credited with helping Trump win over young male voters. After Trump’s inauguration, Tate tweeted that ‘The Tates ...”

“... and sports are by no means all boastful or complicit. The supreme text of recent years is James Fox’s account of Lord Lucan and his set, with their boffes de politesse. There is a touch of Lucanian zombiness in The Monument, and the peer himself takes part in The Passion of John Aspinall. Patrician insolence has quite often appeared to express a ...”

“... as absurd as the old knight – that if Becker is an ‘old wolf’ then Lawrence is a young fox. The passage is comic because of the overstatement, as if ‘naked liberty’ could possibly be an adequate opposition to ‘security and bank-balance and power’. Stylistically, the passage is comic because it is built on contradictions: the two hate each ...”

“... has come to pass. His reputation still rests on the phrase ‘sudden sharp hot stink of fox’, and Birthday Letters, read at a distance of 27 years, contains too much careful positioning to really count as poetry. I do think the problem is that it is too careful, despite Hughes seeming to assume Plath’s Morse abandon, her acrobatic enjambments ...”

“... in seducing language, the illusions of love and the abominable trade of war’. Abraham’s son Richard became Burke’s best friend (Burke wrote sixty letters to him over five years), and the Quaker and Huguenot connections, both in Dublin and in Co. Cork (where Burke’s mother originally came from), are not to be underestimated. As for his Catholic ...”

“... administration in American history. Under microscopic scrutiny by the Republicans and Fox News, Hillary’s emails were the only scandal they could produce. They couldn’t even find some low-level bureaucrat who had used his government franking privilege to send out personal Christmas cards.) Dominated​ by the coming end of the world and its ...”

“... of whom came from socially prominent families, assisted her.’ Her antics were widely discussed. Richard Avedon remembered her organising a photograph of a model in ‘a stiff wedding dress’. Having shouted for pins, Vreeland took one, ‘and walked swinging her hips down the narrow office to the end. She stuck the pin not only into the dress but into the ...”

“... interests of our House I was sacrificed’. Soon after the treaty was signed, Charles II wrote to Richard Fanshawe, soon to be his ambassador in Lisbon: ‘One of the principal advantages we propose to ourself by this entire conjunction with Portugal is the advancement of the trade of this nation and the enlargement of our own territories and ...”