“... XIV (1689-97 and 1702-13). But since a French victory might have resulted in a restoration of the Stuart dynasty at home, the majority were prepared to grit their teeth. And they became even more reconciled to spending the nation’s money on war after 1714, when the weight of taxation began to shift markedly from land to commodities. To collect their ...”

“... the Fontana, the emulsion-on-hardboard multi-head portraits on which a generation of uncatalogued white moulds are breeding. The manifestos have been composed. It’s the time of the Art Wars (1990-93), and Tony Lowes, Philosopher, asserts that ‘to save the starving we must give up art.’ Wittgenstein, apparently, was of the same mind. That’s what it ...”

“... was first used during the French conquest of Algeria in the 19th century, and as the historian Stuart Ward has shown, was widely adopted after the First World War by European intellectuals as they reckoned with imperial decline. From their perspective, decolonisation was the natural telos of empire, and the rise of a post-imperial world order would ...”

“... en route home I generally stop and have some tea at Bettys in Ilkley where I also buy an organic white loaf. Today the assistant tells me that the café (and presumably the four or five other branches in the Bettys chain) no longer does organic produce as they’ve changed their flour miller. ‘However,’ she assures me, ‘the flour is locally ...”

“... intelligence war with some important and lasting friendships including those with Gilbert Ryle, Stuart Hampshire, Guy Liddell and Dick White, who after the war became the head of MI5 and then MI6 – an invaluable contact. And Trevor-Roper enjoyed the company of Kim Philby, whom he found the most intelligent and ...”

“... swung each way from session to session. But on the fourth afternoon, a spell of fast bowling from Stuart Broad turned a promising run-chase into an Aussie collapse. After the fall of Brad Haddin’s wicket, the only question remaining was whether the light would hold long enough to allow England’s seamers to bowl Australia out. The clouds came and England ...”

“... of a brutally divided nation, as divided as it has been at any point in its recent history. Among white voters, who still account for 72 per cent of the total, Romney won the popular vote by a margin of 59 per cent to 39 per cent, a Reaganesque landslide. Men voted in large numbers for Romney; women in even larger numbers for Obama (more women actually ...”

“... deaths in both countries, with ethnic minorities heavily overrepresented. Meanwhile, rage against white supremacism is exploding on American streets. Whatever the fate of these uprisings, the largest since the 1960s, a period of devastation lies ahead. Tens of millions of people are likely to lose their livelihoods and their dignity.As a general insurrection ...”

“... made the Hole into a camera obscura with lid and lens. The collective painted the walls of the pit white, with gesso and gum. Those who came down the ladder into the earth cell, after their eyes adjusted to the absence of light, found the experience captivating. The world above appeared in phantom form, inverted, a ribbon of articulate shadows, trees like ...”

“... tragedy on families living out a curse: Atalanta in Calydon, three plays on the grim fate of Mary Stuart and her lover, and three versions of the doomed affair of Tristram (‘Queen Yseult’, ‘Tristram and Iseult’, ‘The Sailing of the Swallow’). There are many lyric poems set on cliffs, beaches or marshes which must endure the relentless assault of ...”

“... itself,’ he says in his Study of Thomas Hardy, a sentiment which might have been uttered by John Stuart Mill himself. But what Lawrence meant by ‘self’ was not to be confused with the ‘cheap egotism’ of the ‘self-conscious little ego’ described by modern individualism. ‘I know that life, and life only, is the clue to the universe,’ Lawrence ...”

“... appearance had altered, and shocked. ‘Her wind-blown gray hair, her startled gray eyes, her thin white face, belonged to a reluctant visitor from another world, frightened at what she had undergone in this one.’ The biographer has not so much to reconstruct her life as to account for what life did to her. Charlotte Mew was the third child (out of eight) of ...”

“... Defying the advice of the King of Hearts to the White Rabbit, the Oxford History of the Laws of England began in the middle, with the publication in 2003 of its magisterial sixth volume, written by the general editor, John Baker, and covering the years 1483-1558. It then went back to the beginning, with R.H. Helmholz’s opening volume on early canon law ...”

“... fathers of cold-eyed lascivious daughters on the pill … and cannabis-smoking jeans-and-bearded Stuart-haired sons whose oriental contempt for ‘bread’ is equalled only by their insatiable demand for it… men whose first coronary is coming like Christmas; who drift, loaded helplessly with commitments and obligations and necessary observances, into the ...”

“... speeches and efforts to accelerate Iranian nuclear enrichment. In 2006, a Treasury lawyer called Stuart Levey, drawing on the personal connections of his boss, Henry Paulson (the former CEO of Goldman Sachs), met with the heads of the world’s largest banks to warn them to cut ties with Iran. This again proved very unpopular: ‘You fucking ...”