“... school and a Sure Start centre, before a visit to a struggling steel business. On the journey home, he gets embroiled in an email exchange with one of his advisers on the never-ending challenge of trying to nail down the peace in Northern Ireland. He also feels he has to respond to an email from Joanna Lumley, badgering him about rights of residence for ...”

“... Yeats in the great elegy of 1939, newly arrived in America and already determined not to return home, Auden was self-consciously composing a poem that announced a turning point in his career. Announcing a turning point is itself quite a Yeatsian thing to do, of course: Yeats was always writing poems saying that he was now finally done with the gaudy days of ...”

“... title of his work. Swaraj was ‘self-rule’. Politically speaking, it was in effect a call for Home Rule on Irish lines, though this was not an analogy to which he was ever tempted to appeal, since the national movement in Ireland was identified with two strategies – parliamentary and insurrectionary – both of which he rejected for India. But for ...”

“... was first raised with China by the most far-sighted of Hong Kong’s governors, Sir Murray (now Lord) Maclehose, during the first visit ever by a governor to Beijing in March 1979. The tall, dignified Scot had seen a vision of the Hong Kong that was to be; under his aegis, the first harbour tunnel and subway line were begun, and the new airport, still ...”

“... Vendler remarks, it is by such ‘confirmatory coffin nails’ that correspondences are hammered home. But as she points out, grace has some hooks of its own, not only in its initial consonants and vowels which remind us of the greater grief that grace has caused, but also its possession of the same ‘satanic hiss’ that exists in ...”

“... be heightened by the ‘drive against male vice’ initiated in 1954 under David Maxwell Fyfe as home secretary, whose most notable victim was Lord Montagu, imprisoned for 12 months for homosexual offences. On the Tube, Forster closely observes an ‘enormous young foreigner’. Was he perhaps ‘a Cossack dancer? I would ...”

“... his heels – Elizabeth I (1533-1603, ‘queen of England and Ireland’), Cromwell (1599-1658, ‘Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland’), Wellington (1769-1852, ‘army officer and prime minister’), Victoria (1819-1901, ‘queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and empress of India’), Churchill (1874-1965, ‘prime ...”

“... title to his uncle Gyanendra. Dipendra’s obsession with guns at Eton, where he was admired by Lord Camoys as a ‘damn good shot’, his heavy drinking, which attracted the malice of the Sun, his addiction to hashish and his fondness for the films of Arnold Schwarzenegger – all this outlines a philistinism, and a potential for violence, commonplace ...”

“... yourself before others, but that you obey the prophet when he said: “Reveal your ways unto the Lord.”’ This is some way from saying that nobody should be made to confess, but like much other sanctified text it did service as the source of a succession of medieval assertions of a privilege against self-incrimination. But medieval Church practice mocked ...”

“... someone who opposes a net zero emissions goal has in becoming a university vice chancellor. As Lord Wallace of Saltaire remarked in the Lords debate on the higher education legislation last year, ‘If challenging the allegedly oppressive liberal cultural elite means insisting on climate change sceptics being appointed to senior academic positions ...”

“... government with the largest majority since the time of Menderes. Its victory was widely hailed, at home and abroad, as the dawn of a new era for Turkey: not only would the country now be assured stable government, after years of squabbling coalition cabinets, but – still more vital – the prospect of a long overdue reconciliation of religion and ...”

“... might be fought. The whole swathe of territory extending across both sides of the frontier was home to Armenians. What place could they have in the conflict that had now been unleashed? Historically the oldest inhabitants of the region, indeed of Anatolia at large, they were Christians whose Church – dating from the third century – could claim priority ...”

“... master of the continent again? Are not the creation of jobs and growth of incomes issues closer to home? In France the next years are likely to offer an interesting test of the relative weights of consumption and strategy in the process of European integration. Meanwhile the pressures from below, already welling up in strikes and demonstrations, can only ...”

“... all seeking domestic work,’ she said. ‘It is only a magazine. It is not the works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. It is not a manual of magic spells.’ ‘Impertinence will not carry you far,’ the butler said. ‘Only by a short route to dismissal, and no employment tribunal for you, do not think it. Her Majesty’s Government in its wisdom is pleased to ...”

“... had the desired effect as the owner saw his hogs were getting terribly marked and kept them at home.’ What set Rose apart was that he took the trouble to patent his idea and to have it displayed at a farm exhibition held in de Kalb, Illinois.At this stage, iron barbs supplemented wood rather than substituting for it. Wire fencing already existed ‘for ...”