“... a quick look at the new find and declared: ‘No great poet has appeared.’ At Cambridge, Sir Richard Jebb thought that while Bacchylides was no eagle, he ought to be praised as a lively nightingale. ‘Students,’ he added, ‘would find his poetry helpful in facilitating their approach to Pindar.’ Bacchylides had been compared with Pindar from the ...”

“... their carrot and stick ways by the Wellesley brothers (Arthur, the future duke of Wellington, and Richard). They took Low under their wing. His career as company handyman had begun. Men like Low were crucial to company rule in India. When he arrived in Jaipur in 1825 on his first big posting, the company’s resources were at full stretch. Two ...”

“... phenomenon. Although Chamberlain’s return from Munich was televised live (with commentary by Richard Dimbleby), the general consensus in the early days was that television and politics didn’t mix. Thus Sir William Haley, Director-General of the BBC in the late Forties, believed that television was totally unsuited to political discussion. The ...”

“... Perhaps arrogantly, we suspect that people did not feel the need for a statue of Cobden or Richard Coeur de Lion, but felt that they (and, above all, that others) should feel the need. It is noteworthy that despite the concern with commemorating worthies such as King Arthur and Francis Drake in 18th-century England none of the national heroes ...”

“... till his arm ached, and then he flung him into a chair, gasping, cursing, and scarcely human. And Richard Chandos v. Boler, the Boche villain of Dornford Yates’s Cost Price:   ‘Look on your own face,’ I said; ‘for, by God, when you see it next, it won’t look the same.’   Then, as a man puts the weight, I put his face to the wall beside the ...”

“... primarily on a trove of data assembled by a ‘control-freak’ landlord (Hindle’s phrase), Sir Richard Newdigate, 2nd baronet, an ancestor of the landowner for whom Eliot’s father acted as agent. Provoked by a sense of rivalry with neighbouring landowners, Newdigate sent elected officials (called ‘jurors’) knocking on every door in the parish to ...”

“... joining again, was hung with the portraits of prince-bishops, and had ears of corn in its wrought-iron banisters that trembled to the tread. It was glory at last, an escalation of delight, from which small doors, flush with the panelling, moved by levers below the prince-bishops’ high-heeled and rosetted shoes, gave access, at every turn, to the back ...”

“... against the quiet obscurity that satisfied Emily Dickinson, her near contemporary. She married Richard Stoddard, a fervent would-be poet who was never to falter in his support of her aspirations, moved to New York, and cultivated bookish acquaintances. Money was always short, largely because she spent more than she earned. Much of her writing was directed ...”

“... with those who believe that the solution of the world’s problems lies behind the so-called iron curtain.’ Ramos Latour replied: ‘Those with your ideological background think the solution to our evils is to free ourselves from the noxious “Yankee” domination by means of a no less noxious “Soviet” domination.’ Disputes of that kind were to ...”

“... and the early years of the 20th century there were several related attempts, by writers such as Richard Jefferies and Edward Thomas, to identify ‘England’ with ‘the countryside’ (largely for an urban readership), while the interwar decades tended to throw up more quizzical searches for ‘the real England’, assumed to have been submerged by the ...”

“... of the Red Sea, induced by a massive electrical discharge from the comet to Earth; showers of iron dust and edible carbohydrates falling from the comet’s tail, the first turning the waters red and the second nourishing the Israelites in the desert; and plagues of vermin, either infecting Earth from organisms carried in the comet’s tail or caused by ...”

“... IMF, plays a pivotal role in the allocation of investment and savings, is a world in which the ‘iron laws’ of economics will increasingly be tempered by political and moral considerations. A world in which vast funds are recycled to poor countries because they need oil is a world in which vast funds could eventually be recycled to poor countries because ...”

“... summary (of the sort that begin: ‘In 1946 Winston Churchill had delivered his momentous Iron Curtain speech’). Sayre’s own life and career recede into the background, and we only incidentally learn that, after Harvard, she lived in England for a period, married an Englishman, got involved in film (eventually becoming a film critic at the New ...”

“... in debt, with vast overseas commitments it couldn’t afford. (When Churchill went to make his ‘iron curtain’ speech at Fulton, Missouri in March 1946 he did so on an allowance of £10 a day: no exceptions from that Spartan rule could be made for anyone.) On top of that, Attlee faced a difficult new American president, Harry Truman, who relished his own ...”

“... daily ‘hair of the dog that bit me’ basis. We should have known, of course. We were warned by Richard Rorty in 1998: Something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for – someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky ...”