“... 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 ...”

“... passage, was also in the past: it had faltered when Richard Cromwell, who succeeded his father as Lord Protector, lost his nerve in April 1659. As Sharon Achinstein shrewdly notes in the Companion, the description of Samson’s locks is prefigured in a passage in Areopagitica, where Milton imagines ‘a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong ...”

“... household when his mother went foraging round the house for four-leaf clovers, murmuring: ‘The Lord will provide.’ This superstitious ritual had one purpose only: to get old Dr Thomas’s patients to pay their bills. He was not then ‘old’ – I call him so only to distinguish père from fils. Lewis Thomas’s closest friend as a fourth-year medical ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Otto Koch, commandant first of Majdanek and then Buchenwald, stole on the scale of a major drug lord. He was executed by an SS firing squad just before the war ended. In keeping with the KL’s macho ethos, he refused a blindfold. The needs​ of German industry in late 1943 and 1944 changed the KL as much as the Holocaust had in early 1942. Hundreds of new ...”

“... 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 ...”