“... Secretary of State said that throughout this decade he expected to be able to provide, so far as home students were concerned, for constant student numbers and for constant unit income in real terms. It was not long before that expectation was abandoned. Last Christmas he announced that in the next year there would be a 3½ per cent cut in the grant to ...”

“... routinely appeared in American business jokes of the period. Jews were meant to be at home in commerce; Eliot’s “Bleistein” is not.’ The image of Bleistein’s gold teeth in ‘Dirge’ picks up the fondness Jews were supposed to have for that commodity. Bleistein is a commercial failure, however, who lacks even a pauper’s grave – a ...”

“... companion Ross from the party scene in Paris. Taking up an offer to visit them at their country home, Gault House, Carston soon contemplates a romantic fling with Scylla, only to be humiliated when she decides in favour of Picus, a friend and neighbour who until now has been living with his lover Clarence. Carston feels cruelly deceived, while ...”

“... might be nearer the mark.Meanwhile, Johnson shows a keen interest in shoring up his power at home. The Tory manifesto contained a commitment to repeal the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. The Act is said to be widely unpopular, and at the last election the Labour Party also promised to do away with it. But do we really want to go back to the old days of the ...”

“... sent to prison for twelve months after a gamekeeper catches him poaching. In between he brings home the son he has kept a secret for five years – ‘Yours! How long have it been yours?’ his mother asks; ‘Since ’twas born,’ he replies – and for a time, sacked from the choir when Rev. Scroope hears of his indiscretion, he devotes himself to ...”

“... reissue in 1552. In the new 1552 service of Eucharist, the feeling is emphatically of a Reformed Lord’s Supper – not even a Lutheran rite. Not only does it repeatedly shy away from any potentially dramatic liturgical climax until all those present have received the bread and wine – something which already puzzled me when I was in the congregation as a ...”

“... amused themselves by harassing Papists and ransacking their chapels. Fearing political chaos, the lord mayor led a group of civic and religious leaders in pledging allegiance to the occupying forces, but even in the flush of victory William’s advisers were uneasy. ‘The treatment the king met with from the prince of Orange,’ as one of them put ...”

“... In 1951 he exchanged wedding vows with a man, Jess Collins, but while this gave him a stable home and a partner for life, it didn’t do much to slow his trysting. Duncan approved of any commotion that held him at its centre. A blether to his enemies, his friends saw him as a conversationalist in the Coleridgean mould: ‘a circling man/in a seizure of ...”

“... In Lord Dunsany’s​ 1936 novel, Rory and Bran, a fantasia on Irish folk themes, Rory’s parents worry about whether he can be trusted to take the cattle to market on his own. They decide that Bran should escort him, and feel confident that their rather dreamy boy will be well looked after. And so the pair set off ...”

“... rest of his life. The narrative of the walk concludes with the entry for 24 July 1841: Returned home out of Essex and found no Mary – her and her family are as nothing to me now though she herself was once the dearest of all – ‘and how can I forget Quotation marks opened but never closed. The forlorn plea is ambiguous, both question and ...”

“... on that side of the Atlantic, without ever managing to communicate his whereabouts to anyone at home. Peter Ackroyd’s Milton in America (1996) seems curiously, if perhaps unconsciously, parasitic on this earlier extravaganza. Milton, however, despite some fleeting fictional attention from Robert Graves, has never been able to vie with the Romantics in ...”

“... reference to Palestine as ‘a land without people for people without a land’ – an echo of Lord Shaftesbury’s romantic formulation forty years before. Europe’s Jews, Hezl urged, should fill that providential void. To the surprise of the first Zionist emissaries, Palestine was already inhabited. Herzl’s attempt to solve what he and Europe’s ...”

“... bout of Scotophobia without parallel since the violently anti-Scottish mood of the English mob in Lord Bute’s day. The ignorance and nastiness of some of this journalism have been startling. The Daily Telegraph wrote that Scotland was ‘trapped in the squalor of dependency’. ‘Until recently,’ the paper asserted, ‘an English voter hearing Gordon ...”

“... to resolve it. The first was James I’s leading adviser Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury, Lord Burghley’s son, whose ‘Great Contract’ of 1610 attempted to place the Crown’s finances on a less vexatious footing. Bedford used parliamentary pressure to the same end in 1641. Adamson’s account bears out Trevor-Roper’s assessment of Bedford’s ...”

“... case. It appealed to Thomas Wolsey, Henry VIII’s indispensable right hand: cardinal, archbishop, lord chancellor, Wolsey was a formidable broker of power. And it also bought the services of a clever (and therefore expensive) attorney. This was Thomas Cromwell, who in early 1519 went to Rome to make his client’s case at the pope’s court. He journeyed via ...”