“... from Jefferson’s speeches to the rhetoric of abolitionism; even ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ may glance at an earlier line from the poem, about ‘starr’d and spangled courts’. In England, the Ode in Imitation of Alcaeus reached ordinary readers in a broadsheet version distributed free by the Society for Constitutional Information (it purged the ...”

“... response to the death of tonality, and to the death of ‘expressiveness’ it enacted. This may be my ignorance of music – I’m easily overpowered. With Richter there can be no such certainty. I cannot imagine a viewer emerging from the rooms at Tate Modern and being sure that Richter’s endless hovering around the fact of the photograph – his ...”

“... have been so alert to the medium’s cool tricking of the real and the abstract. Badlands may be the most serene film he ever made. A philosopher might have stopped then and there. But he was tickled by the idea of life as a moviemaker.His next film, Days of Heaven (1978), was more flagrantly beautiful and even more widely admired. It’s the story of ...”

“... unique educational value. Evensong has become more of a cultural icon than a religious event. As Richard Dawkins, no theist, put it, ‘I’m a cultural Anglican and I see evensong in a country church through much the same eyes as I see a village cricket match on the village green.’But Stanford hadn’t set out to be only a church music composer. He had ...”

“... after the conquest was painful to relate. In 1855, the philologist and later archbishop of Dublin Richard Chenevix Trench frightened an audience of schoolboys with the story of the deliberate perversion of the language by the French: he accused them of drawing ‘a secret satisfaction, a conscious sense of superiority, in thus stripping the language of its ...”

“... it’s primarily a commodity, culture becomes autonomous. Deprived of its traditional features, it may curve back on itself, taking itself as its own raison d’être in the manner of some modernist art; it is also free to serve as critique on a sizeable scale for the first time. The miseries of commodification are also an enthralling moment of ...”

“... the work seriously. Syberberg eschews a naturalistic or documentary style of presentation. There may be more hard facts than soft focuses in the film, but the facts are woven into images from which they are inseparable. They would not be much help in passing an exam in history or civics. In a work as full of conceit as it is of conceits, Syberberg shows an ...”

“... The English are not at their best, although they may well be at their most characteristic, when they go on a lot about the dear old days at school or the ’varsity. Not even the inspired Cyril Connolly could get his tongue far enough into his cheek to be anything more tolerable than stomach-turning about Eton. George Orwell, who had been there too but thought it was possible to have a life afterwards, was surely right to tell him to come off it ...”

“... exhilaration was felt in Britain. Australians who had felt themselves to be in exile here, such as Richard Neville, the editor of Oz, hurried home to help with the crusade. Germaine Greer briefly ceased to knock her own country. Almost anything seemed possible. In three years, the dream collapsed, in circumstances that had a lasting effect. On 11 November 1975 ...”

“... two nations were fighting to decide to which of them ‘the empire of the seas shall belong’, may have overestimated the confidence of both sides, but the even-handedness of his judgment is more persuasive than the English posture of righteous defensiveness. Here as elsewhere Pincus’s decision to base so much of his account of Dutch politics on English ...”

“... Even more telling, he shows Henry to have been an efficient and discerning ruler. Odd as the claim may seem, although it would not have seemed at all strange to the King himself, Henry epitomised the ideal of the Renaissance prince, the focal point of a humanist enterprise aimed at educating the one person in the realm who had power over everything. When ...”

“... appears as something sublime; and a man who does not submit to the machinery, though submission may mean his death, is regarded as a sinner against some kind of divine order.’ Arendt’s sombre vision struck a nerve. In a memoir of New York intellectual life, Midge Decter has recalled the debates that raged in the early Fifties over Arendt’s ...”

“... 31 December 1765, Rousseau’s capacity for clear judgment faltered.’ Even the most paranoid may sometimes be right to believe they are suffering unjust persecution; but the effect of being right is almost sure to be to make them entertain even wilder suspicions. By this time, Rousseau had worn out his welcome at Môtiers, and had accepted Hume’s offer ...”

“... sand expressed the hope that ‘many centuries hence when other memory of it shall be lost, [they] may declare to succeeding ages that [this] place was once a member of the British Empire.’ Within a few days of this final appeal to posterity, the remaining settlers would be either dead or enslaved, the captives of Moulay Ismaïl, the Alaouite Sultan of ...”

“... dismissed (which is pretty much Norman Lamont’s career in a nutshell). Later in the century, Richard FitzNeal, first as dean of Lincoln and latterly as bishop of London, continued in his day job in the church while moonlighting as treasurer ” for an apparently unbroken forty years. It’s as though Jim Callaghan were now preparing to leave 11 Downing ...”