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“... minority under 18th-century mortality levels. At some point in their lives Adam Smith, John Miller, William Robertson and David Hume began to question the theology in which they had been reared: Camic is convinced that ‘their revolution was a union of circumstances’ – in other words, that it was their rearing which freed them for it. That Adam ...”

“... devising elaborations that get round obscenity. Still, an enjoyable film, if an anachronistic one, e.g. ‘the opposition’ not a feature of Parliament in the 18th century.11 February. A piece in the TLS by Laura Freeman about how hunger was reflected in the novels of the postwar period. I suppose it’s because it’s to do with novels (and therefore middle ...”

“... about all this, but it was all part of the atmosphere. AH: Where was the office? FW: Just off St James’s, Park Place or something. Very pretty, a very old rickety building, with one lavatory, and a funny person who lived at the top. And then all the writs began arriving. Verschoyle wasn’t a shy man, but he couldn’t tell anybody. In some mysterious way ...”

“... intimate occasions of which this is not true.)’ In the jacket photograph she was decked out as James Joyce, with a felt-tip monocle over one eye. ‘The picture of you on the back rather turns my head,’ Murdoch wrote. ‘You dazzling creature.’ (Years later, she tried a new tack: ‘I am not a great writer. Neither are you.’)After Brophy’s first ...”

“... talents: but she outdid them in using it, most touchingly of all, to arrange her death. Betty Miller intuited this, some years back, in her excellent little book on Browning. Elizabeth herself intuited that her husband and son, tremendous and eupeptic pals as they were, had really no further use for her; and in a sense they confirmed this by their calm ...”

“... of the country house and the royal palace: the handsome buildings commissioned by Herman Miller Inc (manufacturers of furniture by Eames and Mies van der Rohe) and the glass-fronted modern Versailles of the GM technical centre. Some of the best buildings are those which record pure Yankee ingenuity: the Octagon Barn of the ...”

“... Howe; Lionel Trilling called it ‘reserved and beautifully realised’. Six years later Karl Miller found The Widow’s Children ‘a compelling and satisfying book’. All those endorsements, however, didn’t keep her novels from going out of print at the end of the decade (they were reprinted in the 1980s, but went out of print again). Then Jonathan ...”

“... On​ the last day of 2003, Macedonian border guards arrested Khaled el-Masri at the Serbian border. He had a suspicious name, and the Macedonians didn’t like the look of his passport. After beating el-Masri, stripping him and searching him with painful and highly invasive thoroughness, the Macedonians turned him over to the CIA, which flew him to the ‘Salt Pit’, a black site in Afghanistan ...”

“... and the Hanoverian accession in 1714. With the defeat of Catholic supporters of the deposed James II in Ireland – then a subordinate kingdom belonging to England – in 1690, sectarian divisions, which foreshadow the differences between today’s Ulster unionists and Irish nationalists, became more deeply entrenched. Gibraltar was acquired in 1704 ...”

“... status with charm and good humour’. Henderson introduced Hamilton to Roland Penrose and Lee Miller, the power couple who both supported the IG and exposed Hamilton to Duchamp – most importantly, to The Green Box, the book of notes detailing the making of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23), a.k.a. The Large Glass. At this ...”

“... star and Buster Keaton.’ The November 2022 cover feature had the strapline: ‘Sienna Miller has overslept’. Whether the reference to Gay Talese’s famous Esquire piece, ‘Frank Sinatra has a cold’, was intentional hardly matters. The line has been used in so many cover stories it has become its own trope.Despite the big claims and obvious ...”

“... do it for him, but there is a striking picture of a pool in a secret wood: ‘The trees bend/O’er it as wild men watch a sleeping girl,/And thro’ their roots long creeping plants stretch out/Their twined hair, steeped and sparkling.’ That is creepily brilliant, anticipating many of Browning’s sudden shocks of the real in the much better poems that ...”

“... and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid narcissism, chemical tourism through the Third World. Enough of ill-disciplined prose and rootless lives. Enough of midnight ...”

“... a more specialised admirer: history obsessives, novelists (Hilary Mantel, Sarah Waters, Madeline Miller), classicists (Robin Lane Fox, Bettany Hughes), historians (Tom Holland), who salute her muscular resurrections of the classical world, and gay men who see her as a pioneer in her writing about homosexual relationships. Along with hundreds of other gay ...”

“... point. The infant Hercules from the Greek ode becomes a Brobdingnagian monster: ‘The big-limm’ed Babe in his huge Cradle lay.’ This has affinities with the consciously coarse-lined, gigantesque drawings which Giulio Romano did for the Palazzo del Tè in Mantua, but it has little to do with Pindar. Elsewhere, when a certain grossness is needed, the ...”