“... structure founded by Great Britain’s defeat of the French Revolution. The scholarship of David Cannadine and Linda Colley has shown how this was done and how vital the monarchy was to the process. The rejigged royal institution was the mechanism for weening an unruly, half-revolutionary people away from its own past. The defeat of France shored up a ...”

“... of the college and had left money to fund scholarships for deserving undergraduates of limited means. One of these duly went to his great-grandson. Sterne had reason to think that he was better than his circumstances had made him. After Cambridge, he did what many intelligent young men without money would do, and became a clergyman, eased into modest ...”

“... is dead. There are many distinguished analytic philosophers, particularly admirers of Kripke like David Lewis and Frank Jackson, who are unabashed physicalist metaphysicians. They think of themselves as continuing the struggle against mystificatory nonsense that Thomas Huxley waged against Bishop Wilberforce, Russell against Bergson, and Carnap against ...”

“... West seemed so excited to find the Arafat era at an end. Peace is not about to break out, if peace means a binding, mutually satisfactory resolution of the ‘final status’ issues in dispute between Israel and the Palestinians: Jerusalem, refugees, sovereignty, recognised borders, settlements and water. The reason is simple: the two most powerful Middle ...”

“... her as he had smiled in the Exchequer House.She cried out in feigned alarm: ‘My lord . . . what means this?’He smiled. As though she did not know! But he enjoyed the masquerade as much as she did. Of late she had perhaps been overeager, and a certain amount of resistance had always appealed to him. So she protested but her heart was not in the ...”

“... in which the imagination is a new saviour at the heart of an aesthetic theology: ‘Poetry is a means of redemption’ or ‘Poetry is a renovation of experience’ or ‘The mind is the most powerful thing in the world.’ The Romantics may have invented this all-powerful sense of the aesthetic, but they invented the distrust of it as well. Keats could ...”

“... She hit the big time in the 1970s and has never been remotely precious about her stories, which means she’s told most of them loads of times already, most notably in Lester Bangs’s Blondie (1980) and in Making Tracks: The Rise of Blondie (1982), an autobiography ghosted by Victor Bockris but written, supposedly, by Harry herself, in collaboration with ...”

“... January, they have been managed by a new Task Force Europe, led by Johnson’s chief negotiator, David Frost, a burly, acerbic diplomat, one of the few in the Foreign Office who has always loathed the EU. Frost’s conversations with Michel Barnier have become openly bitter and recriminatory, in a way not seen before. Frost is backed up by contemptuous ...”

“... Taking​ British Communist art seriously means, to a degree at least, taking British Communism seriously. This is difficult to do when looking at Viscount Hastings’s mural from 1935, The Worker of the Future Clearing Away the Chaos of Capitalism, in what is now the Marx Memorial Library in Clerkenwell. The library is a 1960s reconstruction of an 18th-century school, which by the early 20th century housed, among other things, the printing house of Iskra, the newspaper of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party ...”

“... for, the proper plural of meat being meat. Perhaps meats (on a van: ‘British Premium Meats’) means cooked meats, though meat would still be acceptable there, too. Meats suggests to me something not only cooked but sliced, and already beginning to curl at the edges. Odd that one should have any feelings, let alone care, about such usages.31 January. The ...”

“... him as ‘quite miserable-looking … so thin, so little, so miserable’. The art critic David Bourdon thought his art collection ‘stank’ and took the view that Warhol was nothing more than ‘a window trimmer and chichi East Side gadabout who hung around with trashy people’. In the world of commercial art, as photography began to overtake ...”

“... normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space of a couple of decades, the ...”

“... of Utopia, that inverted image of England, prefer elective to hereditary rule; they devise means to prevent their prince and his advisers from ‘conspiring together to oppress the people in tyranny’; they retain the right to ‘depose’ the prince ‘for suspicion of tyranny’. Around the time he wrote Utopia – and long before Henry presented ...”

“... 1974. The shock of seeing a Tory government evicted by what appeared to be almost insurrectionary means (the mass picketing of the Saltley coke depot was the locus classicus of this image) produced hysteria in the Conservative Party. Some Tory MPs began openly to espouse institutional strategems – PR, a written constitution etc – to prevent any future ...”

“... not good, it’s good.’ No one is immune to a degree of corniness when it comes to Cannes. David Lynch’s Cannes Diary, a ten-part series of short missives documenting his experience as jury president in 2002, is primarily a vehicle for him to indulge his love of café au lait, pain au chocolat, baguette avec fromage and vin rouge. He praises the ...”