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“... a cold-hearted philanderer, and an insecure snob who was evasive about his origins as Cecil Smith from Camberwell. Forester had encouraged a younger writer, Dudley Pope, to make a play for his vast readership once he left the scene, but here too things didn’t work out as planned. In 1967, Robert Hill, an editor at Pope’s American ...”

“... If Tony Blair had been charged with selling honours for cash, could he (or John Reid, or Jacqui Smith, or whoever was home secretary at the time) have procured the grant of a pardon in the name of the queen? I can’t think any British lawyer would give an affirmative answer to the question. One ground for rejecting it is technical. The royal prerogative of ...”

“... Warner wrote the introduction). When Hockney’s prints were published a few years later, in 1967, Stephen Spender, a friend and early advocate, collaborated on a new translation with the publisher Nikos Stangos, himself Greek and a poet, of 14 of the Cavafy poems, which were illustrated by 12 of the etchings. The transmission of the poems, from the cultural ...”

“... 1950s he lived in Italy, where he became friends with Auden; later he taught at Bard College, Smith College, the University of Rochester and Georgetown. His first book of poems, A Summoning of Stones, was published in 1954. In 1968 he won the Pulitzer for his next volume, The Hard Hours. His Collected Earlier Poems were published in 1990; his Collected ...”

“... culture and language may actually affect perception, thought and cognition,’ Horacio Fabrega and Stephen Tyma wrote in 1976, ‘then to that extent they may also affect the actual experience of pain.’ In the West, when the humoral theory of bodily function was extant, pains were often described as migratory, like the humours themselves. Steam engines ...”

“... Mannheim, Merton, Parsons, Radcliffe-Brown and more. In his preface he thanks Adorno, Henry Nash Smith, I.A. Richards, Talcott Parsons and Peter Laslett, among others. The standard caricature of the Cambridge-influenced criticism of the postwar years represents it as blunderingly empirical and cosily parochial: these stereotypes wilt and shrivel when ...”

“... doomed to a swift, ignominious end, a 38-year-old economist from Birmingham University called Stephen Littlechild was working on ways to realise an esoteric idea that had been much discussed in radical Tory circles: privatisation. Privatisation was not a Thatcher patent. The Spanish economist Germà Bel traces the origins of the word to the German word ...”

“... of poor Edward VI, a pious ejaculation is being made in pure Cranmer. Ascham, Cheke and Thomas Smith get less attention than ‘wily Winchester’, their conservative antagonist Stephen Gardiner, the flail of the Lord, with toenails like the claws of ravening beasts, according to Foxe. This is perhaps as it should ...”

“... the Tory leader had finished his set of tennis. Then there was the drink. Margot denounces F.E. Smith for drinking too much, ‘which is always ruinous to anyone’. She cannot have been unaware that her husband was lightly pickled a lot of the time and on a couple of occasions too soused to wind up a debate in the Commons. Not for nothing did George ...”

“... most weekends and are unreported. The 17N group, responsible for the assassination of Brigadier Stephen Saunders, the British military attaché in Athens, in June 2000, had been rounded up, so it was claimed, just in time for the Olympics. Savas Xiros, the alleged motorbike gunman, was arrested after a lethal device he was carrying went off ...”

“... will sense something odd about such reliance on a vision predating not only David Hume and Adam Smith, but Darwin, Freud, Marx and Durkheim, from an age when genes and the structure of human DNA were undreamt of. Can philosophy really be so timeless? The answer is plainly yes, provided a sufficiently passionate sermon can be extracted out of it, for ...”

“... humour has a flintier edge. It is, for example, difficult to miss the disdain in a description of Stephen Spender as ‘a literary mover and shaker, knighted in 1983. His wealthy, artistic parents sent him to various private schools and Oxford, but he left without taking a degree.’ Similarly, it is hard not to detect the verdict of moral absurdity in his ...”

“... to allow bitterness to linger. Two of the poem’s other translators, Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith, describe its ‘exquisitely subtle blend of ferocity and tenderness’. ‘Let my heart preserve me from all hate,’ the narrator intones. He also draws back from some of the more celebratory aspects of racial self-pride, laughing at his own ‘former ...”

“... right to shop where they liked. This reform propelled cost-conscious producers into W.H. Smith, where buying CDs was cheaper than renting them from the BBC music library, and away from the BBC’s fact-checking services, where checking pronunciation was charged at £12 a word. As a consequence of producer choice, the BBC closed down its ...”

“... Carpenter’s excellent life of Auden has a nice turn of phrase in recounting the moment when Stephen Spender, arrived in an Oxford of the later Twenties which was pervaded by the legend of Auden, at last met his fellow undergraduate and ‘found the reality just as remarkable as that legend’. The story appears to have come from Spender, himself ...”