“... the male dons going to such trouble.Beyond these celebrity lectures, she cultivated a distinctive brand of quirky and memorable outspokenness. Reminiscences is full of anecdotes which illustrate exactly that. While still a student, for example, she stood up to William Gladstone when he came to Cambridge to visit his student ...”

“... never misses an opportunity for attack,’ John Gawsworth, an admiring contemporary, observed. William Rothenstein thought him ‘armed and armoured, like a tank, ready to cross any country, however rough and hostile’. He certainly had a genius for pugnacity, no doubt partly encouraged by the example Hulme set: ‘a very rude and truculent man’ in ...”

“... Sidney’s mentor Hubert Languet and to his most powerful Continental champions, John Casimir and William of Orange. The years which followed produced disappointment and frustration. Sidney and Greville found their progress at court, and their plans for military service in Europe and exploration in the New World, blocked by a queen who could not be won to the ...”

“... the various uses made of Coriolanus in history creates particular difficulties for Patterson’s brand of essentialism because it indicates that no text is wholly obdurate, hardened into single meaning. The opposite case can be just as persuasively put. It would argue that texts yield only to reading and that reading is a political and a politicising ...”

“... ignored, but this was different. This was, in some way, a quality product, good for you, and brand new like the carpet and the curtains and the stereo. It cost money, but somehow it was worth it. It was real, and pure. But not too real or too pure. It was expensive but not too expensive. Someone got its image just right; someone packaged it perfectly. It ...”

“... and career of Robert Louis Stevenson, another Scottish writer who looked at human adventure as a brand of metaphysics. Nowadays, people with a heart for proper adventure (or ‘extreme sports’) like to load themselves with equipment and dive into the ocean looking for wrecks, and it is said that the best ‘wreck dive’ in Britain is to the ...”

“... what kinds of appeal they would respond to. It was with this in mind that in December it set up a brand new Home Intelligence Department, within the fairly new Ministry of Information (or propaganda), to find out. It was headed by Mary Adams, one of British television’s earliest producers, before TV was shut down for the duration of the war: she moved to ...”

“... in English architecture – they preferred the low-key and an absence of grandeur. ‘Betjeman’s brand of evocation,’ Harries says, ‘is more about churchgoing than about the churches themselves, and tends to turn the focus on the observer as much as the object observed.’ Pevsner’s researches were more unrelenting, and if close observation reveals the ...”

“... international reputation was steadily growing – but in accordance with Joseph II’s draconian brand of rationalism: as well as banning corsets, bell-ringing in thunderstorms and the making of honey cakes, the Emperor had strictly enlightened views on how to economise on and sanitise burial of Vienna’s dead. In spite of this new and more accurate picture ...”

“... Salisbury’. Some other recent world-histories have taken a stand against Euro-centrism, notably William McNeill’s A World History (1971) and J.M. Roberts’s The Hutchinson History of the World (1976). In this regard, Mr Thomas is a self-conscious reactionary. He will have none of what he calls ‘well-intentioned complaints about the parochiality’ of ...”

“... the halo of hush around beauty. McBride is closer in her aesthetic to Jack Butler Yeats than to William, with her preference for smudges and streaks, abrupt smears of language, her avoidance of the sort of brush-stroke that vanishes, its job done, into the likeness of the thing represented. Her prose has a tactile, built-up texture, so perhaps what she ...”

“... standards. You can watch him and one of the uncles on YouTube, being nimbly tormented by Russell Brand: two pudgy doofuses you’d think twice about accepting a pizza delivery from, let alone instruction concerning your immortal soul. And yet not even Drain, whom she clearly loathed, was enough to push Megan over the edge. In her twenties now, she had become ...”

“... come apart in a welter of recrimination and relapse. AA survives by virtue of its peculiar brand of communism. There are no dues, it will not accept bequests. Meetings are self-supporting: usually you put a dollar in the basket – this is the seventh tradition. Any money surplus to immediate requirements (typically, the hire of a dusty church hall, an ...”

“... the companies, it pays to start early. Market research suggests that children often recognise a brand logo before they can recognise their own name. Much child-directed advertising aims to turn kids into fifth columnists within their families, nagging their parents to the checkout. The marketing guru James U. McNeal, in his 1992 book Kids as ...”

“... on a par with Winston’s life of Lord Randolph for devotion and discretion. Then, in 1960, William Camp completed his ‘unofficial portrait’, which took its title, The Glittering Prizes, from one of Birkenhead’s more controversial and offensive later speeches, and pulled no punches at all. As biographies, they were both eminently readable in ...”