“... memories of 6 January were at any risk of fading, they were rekindled on 28 October, when David DePape attacked Paul Pelosi, husband of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, with a hammer after breaking into their home in San Francisco (she subsequently announced she was standing down as Speaker). DePape shook Pelosi awake with cries of ‘Where’s ...”

“... within the various [agencies]. This use of duplicate external service providers was often a means by which corruption was allowed to flourish.’ McKinsey South Africa also partnered with two Gupta front companies, Regiments Capital and Trillian Capital Partners, to secure contracts with Transnet and Eskom. In each case, Zupta functionaries in the ...”

“... is no record of such a letter from Maberley in the Post Office archives.’ This means that either Maberley (who on the evidence of the record was well-disposed to the young clerk) sent an unofficial poison-pen letter, or that there was no official ‘character’ of the damning kind Trollope describes. There would of course be no problem if ...”

“... best be understood if one sees the Afrikaners as deliberately using the political instruments as a means of pulling themselves up from the socially and economically-handicapped status of a proletarian nation. Until 1948, the average income of urbanEnglish-speaking whites was well over twice that of Afrikaners. Before the Second World War Afrikaners supplied 20 ...”

“... of the diverse Victorian literature of sex, making worthwhile generalisations more feasible. It means that the diversity may overlie a relatively homogeneous sexual culture: in the sense that writers are likely to be more alert to other possibilities of belief and action in their community than they acknowledge (something of this sort is often all that ...”

“... This is not just a matter of red roses: the Party will need to rethink what (if anything) it means by socialism, and reach a more balanced view about how central it has been within its traditions. This may well entail re-assessing Gaitskell’s attack on Clause 4 after the Party’s defeat in 1959. Morgan dismisses this initiative as ‘a victory for ...”

“... brother John became the estate surveyor. Brown’s father died when Lancelot was only four, but means had been found to keep him at school until he was 16, possibly with the help of the Loraines, after which he went as an apprentice to the head gardener at Kirkharle. It is one of the ironies of Brown’s peculiar reputation that in his lifetime and since he ...”

“... one sees, in addition to his old friends Tolkien and Stanley Bennett, such leading Christians as David Knowles, Benedictine monk and ecclesiastical historian, and Basil Willey, lifelong Methodist and member of the literary panel for the translation of the New English Bible. (The electors’ second choice, to whom they offered the chair during Lewis’s ...”

“... in need of constant protection. Menacing ‘jungles’ have become the exotic ‘rainforests’ of David Attenborough documentaries, shrinking islands of environmental purity. The adjective ‘wild’, once applied to the savage creatures and barbarous landscapes of postlapsarian nature, has been reduced to a mark of culinary approbation. In Ruth Pavey’s ...”

“... In​ the early 1960s, David Hockney made a series of etchings inspired by the poems of Constantine Cavafy; he went to Egypt to discover the places Cavafy had drunk coffee and picked up lovers, but in the images it’s mainly Hockney’s own life and friends who figure. The etchings touch on rapture, and the frankness of their erotic pleasure at the sight and memory of boys in bed brought Cavafy to a new, wide readership ...”

“... claims that ‘there is no conclusive evidence to associate it with him.’ At a basic level this means that there is no contemporary or early ascription of the poem to Dunbar, a criterion for inclusion for all the 84 poems in her edition. But, to look at it another way, since the five surviving manuscript copies are all English, and Dunbar was not a ...”

“... this from first-hand testimony from defectors, including Saddam’s own son-in-law.’ At Camp David on 7 September, Tony Blair said proof of a genuine nuclear threat had come in ‘the report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) this morning, showing what has been going on at the former nuclear weapon sites’. Saddam had killed his ...”

“... make unlikely aesthetes and philosophers: the flattened affect displayed by Keir Dullea’s David Bowman in 2001 seems the more likely personality profile, or the slow psychological implosion of the cosmonauts in Solaris. But the characters in Orbital can’t leave the meaning of life alone. If Nell indicates the multidimensional field of view outside ...”

“... but the books which have been written and inspired by English snobs and sports are by no means all boastful or complicit. The supreme text of recent years is James Fox’s account of Lord Lucan and his set, with their boffes de politesse. There is a touch of Lucanian zombiness in The Monument, and the peer himself takes part in The Passion of John ...”

“... Modernist tradition, let alone return to the clichés of the Academy’s summer show; 4) it means reinventing painting to incorporate the subversive new strategies of Conceptual Art, thus undercutting both the Realist and Modernist traditions, whose epic struggle has now lost its meaning. It doesn’t matter whether Norman Rosenthal was thinking about ...”