“... guidance’ on ‘promoting British values in schools’ – a necessary move, according to Lord Nash, the schools minister, ‘to improve safeguarding and … strengthen the barriers to extremism’. The British values to be promoted are defined as ‘democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance for those of ...”

“... mass base for the national struggle, directly under the aegis of the Church. Mobilisation at home was accompanied by pressure abroad, in the first place on Athens to take up the issue of self-determination in Cyprus at the UN, but also – departing from the traditions of the Church – rallying support from Arab countries in the region. None of this ...”

“... Blunt’s phrase, with whom, it seems, members of the British upper crust felt peculiarly at home. In her detailed account of four Victorian orientalist writers – Burton, Palgrave, Blunt and Doughty – she follows the emergence of this literary archetype and its Anglo-Saxon complement: the wandering Englishman uniquely qualified to ...”

“... judged Bishop Aylmer by, the letter he wrote to the future Earl of Leicester in 1559: ‘Good my Lord, if the deanery of Winchester be not already swallowed up, let me among the rest of the small fishes have a snatch at the bait. If it be gone, I beseech your good lordship cast a hook for the deanery of Durham.’ What mattered was not how bishops obtained ...”

“... it might have survived. Though it smacked of Maytime in Mayfair, it was a lot more than just a home-grown New Yorker and there was no real competition from Punch, which it far outstripped in its writing. As with the New Yorker before it got fat, Night and Day’s strength was in its departments. The personnel sounds like a dream roster, an all-time ...”

“... consists in missing the main point. (The contrast between Mr Rhodes James’s tender handling of Lord Randolph Churchill and the brusque treatment that statesman suffered at the hands of Roy Foster comes irresistibly to mind.) Albert liked Peel not only for his high seriousness, sense of public duty and moral commitment to the welfare of the mass of the ...”

“... carry that culture.’ ‘The crux’ is how to make use ‘of the talents of our people here at home. There is a ... drive ... to learn and improve, but the energy has dissipated in internal attrition.’ ‘We have lost our spirit of enquiry, our spirit of freedom.’ ‘What we say is not real.’ ‘People simply do not trust each other any ...”

“... batch of letters she had saved from the flames to her grand-niece, Lady Knatchbull, whose son, Lord Brabourne, had them published – like precious relics – in 1884. A number of other letters have surfaced since then; the great Austen scholar, R.W. Chapman, issued the first modern edition of the correspondence in 1932. Still, only 161 Austen letters are ...”

“... of the hemisphere. In the first novel it was the military; in the second, Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord, it was narcoterrorism. In The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman the threat comes from the Catholic Church – more specifically, a bloody Crusade launched by the mad cardinal of the title. As before, the town is saved from destruction by the heroic ...”

“... Browne was a Laudian of the speculative, eirenic strain, akin in spirit to the intellectuals of Lord Falkland’s Great Tew Circle. The eirenic tendency – ‘I never could divide my selfe from any man upon the difference of an opinion,’ Browne writes – might look apolitical, but when push came to shove in 1642 such persons inclined to the king. During ...”

“... Blair could be pretty confident that his luck would hold. He knew, as we all know now, that Lord Hutton’s wheel was tilted heavily the government’s way. It was Gavyn Davies and Greg Dyke of the BBC, foolishly trying to play Blair at his own game, who bet the farm, and lost. This risk-averse, high-stakes strategy is one of the things that set Blair ...”

“... of Seeing Things (1991) came out of bruising rounds of academic labour and the hurly-burly of home life. Even the cottage in Glanmore became a problem as Heaney’s family grew and grew up. To one of his touchiest correspondents, the poet John Montague, he confessed in 1976: ‘I’m in a furious mess over the housing question. This place is a hellhole ...”

“... Of the life of this world But the things that endure, Good Deeds, are best In the sight of the Lord. The montage is touching and grotesque: the simple pieties of the Koran in jarring contrast with the crude mock-up of the dead couple in their wedding finery. Who could have dreamed up such a folly? The Di Castro Travel Agency, according to an engraved ...”

“... and small beads, so that if an end-result is a very small bead – the governor in a Swiss rest-home – it is grotesquely out of proportion with the horrors that had led up to it. Much of this appearance of logic is due to the device of the supposedly objective narrator used here by Dostoevsky. In Crime and Punishment, the reader was mostly inside ...”

“... the first Modernists had, was less eclectic in his literary tastes and sources, and much more at home in a domestic English landscape and history. He did, however, have a strong intuition of the unreliability of the shelter which all of this offered, and while he naturally cherished it, he had a strong urge to divest himself of it.He was hungering for a ...”