“... John Stevas did a disservice by exaggerating their likely role. This enabled traditionalists like Michael Foot and Enoch Powell to warn that expanding the role of the committees might distract attention from the proper Parliamentary forum, the floor of the House. On their view, this would damage the position of individual members and of Parliament ...”

“... how it could have been done better. Puisaye was one of history’s most consistent losers. As a young nobleman he entered the army at 19, only to be made redundant almost at once. In 1792 he commanded the ‘federalist’ army at the ‘battle’ of Brécourt or Pacy-sur-Eure, an engagement remarkable in military history for the fact that there were no ...”

“... writers – Bernard Levin, Philippa Pullar – put their hand to food, or food pundits – Michael Smith, Egon Ronay – venture upon writing. The caricaturists of Puritanism did their work early, for the Restoration Court exercised a Reagan-like hold on the media. At this period, one of the 17th century’s better cookery books – apparently the work ...”

“... in Erkenntnis in its great days. And it is of course true that in the Thirties in Oxford the young A.J. Ayer was seen by most of his philosophical elders as expounding an alien and distinctively Germanic doctrine in Language, Truth and Logic. Ayer himself, although recognising how much he shared with the native analytical school of philosophers who had ...”

“... person of Ayatollah Khomeini, has reached over the Sunni-Shia sectarian divide, appealing to the young, the poor and the dispossessed in the name of a socially radical Islam that denounces foreign manipulation, abuses of wealth and the corruption of princes. On the other hand, the internal dynamics of the Revolution have taken Iran in the opposite ...”

“... chief obfuscator. For he has managed to rescue his subject from the hagiographic mausoleum which Michael Foot, Bevan’s official biographer, constructed for him, and replaces the edifying statuary of the authorised version with a fallible mortal whose enduring fascination lies in his fallibility. Foot knew and loved Bevan, of course. Partly because of ...”

“... been in the game a long time. Walter Benjamin saw it as the stories which the old recount to the young, and its disintegration in modern times seemed to him one of the most grievous forms of human poverty. The warning that experience is fading from the modern world is sounded all the way from Heidegger to Adorno. The ‘eternal now’ of modern urban ...”

“... vignettes like Chatwin’s, humorous and on occasion startling. The best of them are memorable. Michael Ignatieff watches Chatwin ‘like an old baboon’ under a mulberry tree in the south of France, having his hair combed by his wife. The ravenous Francis Wyndham and James Fox spoon up a pitifully notional soufflé made from wild strawberries which they ...”

“... good one – about 40,000 pounds more a year.’ The Langhornes were a loyal clan (Nancy’s son Michael Astor called his memoirs Tribal Feeling), so it’s not surprising that Nancy was always giving money to her poorer sisters and buying them houses, nor that she financed her eldest child throughout his life. Bobbie was chucked out of the Army for being ...”

“... century earlier; many of his ideas about painting were formed in front of them. With Barzizza the young Alberti became adept not merely in reading classical literature but in imitating it so successfully that his early play, Philodoxeos Fabula, was widely credited as a work of antiquity. Grafton shows how he also learned to incorporate classical references ...”

“... were supposed to have hunted down and murdered Merlin in these woods; the valley was home to Michael Scott, a wizard who appears in Dante’s Inferno. The area was in unruly border country, and it is also on the spine of Scotland, where the waters divide to flow west or east. James Laidlaw’s grandfather Will O’Phaup followed fairies one evening into ...”

“... one has to admire Rimington for what she’s prepared to say about herself. As a girl and as a young woman she was nervous, anxious and terrified of lightning, and suffered from a form of claustrophobia which made her ‘come out in a cold sweat and start to shake’ if there were any people between her and the doors in a room. Before her wedding (at the ...”

“... her shoulders’, walked the streets crying ‘four bunches a penny’; and mudlarks, principally young boys, girls, old men and many old women, who spent the day with ‘their trousers tucked up, groping about picking out pieces of coal, iron, wood and copper nails’ from the mud on the banks of the Thames. Unlike the street-sellers, whose lives were ...”

“... closed canopies or those with small openings. Furthermore, Daniel Kelly has found that in Ireland young oaks in the open were worse affected by mildew than those under a canopy. Conversely, Rackham cites instances of regeneration in existing woods in the Middle Ages, but perhaps does not allow for the effect on the non-oak ‘underwood’ of coppicing for ...”

“... suggestion. He proposes that we should take seriously the fact that Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, the young and beautiful Roman nobleman with whom Michelangelo fell in love and for whom he made a spectacular series of meticulously finished drawings with mythological (and cryptically allegorical) subjects – the Ganymede, Tityus, Fall of Phaeton and Children’s ...”