“... standards, needs, social conditions and circumstances.’ He went on to quote Lord Justice Simon Brown, from a Court of Appeal judgment in 2003: ‘Judges nowadays have no alternative but to apply the Human Rights Act 1998. Constitutional dangers exist no less in too little judicial activism as in too much. There are limits to the legitimacy of executive or ...”

“... Julie’s domestic existence is shattered; in Enduring Love, Clarissa and Joe witness the death of John Logan as he falls from a balloon, are changed for ever, and spend the rest of the novel trying to absorb the consequences of the spectacle; Black Dogs is in part about how Bernard Tremaine, a politician, scientist and rationalist, drifts away from his ...”

“... Henry Adams reports in his autobiography that at a dinner at the American Embassy at which John Bright was the chief British guest, he thumped the table and announced: ‘the English are a nation of brutes and should be exterminated to the last man.’ This statement shocked Henry Adams, James Russell Lowell, the Minister, and the other Americans ...”

“... newspaper articles, the editions of GK’s Weekly, the poems (most of them execrable), the Father Brown stories, the fantastical novels, the works of criticism, the religious apologetics, the travel pieces, the parodies, the many public speeches, the Introductions to other people’s books, the Even Fatter Man had many outlets for his ...”

“... from Fleet Headquarters at Northwood. Now we find the submarine commander, Christopher Wreford-Brown DSO, saying in Our Falklands War: We were tasked to look for and find the General Belgrano Group. It was reported to consist of the cruiser and escorts. We located her on our passive sonar and sighted her visually early in the afternoon of 1 May. We took ...”

“... did come, it was crammed with garrulous schoolchildren. It was raining hard as they walked up the brown path leading to the sanatorium. There they waited again; and instead of their boy shuffling into the room as he usually did (his poor face blotched with acne, ill-shaven, sullen, and confused), a nurse they knew, and did not care for, appeared at last and ...”

“... and so my own? For the quiet joy of breathing and living Tells me whom I am to thank? Clarence Brown, whose translation that is, observes in his excellent book on Mandelstam’s poetry that ‘so one and so my own’ (Takim edinim i takim moim) trembles, both in Russian and English, on the verge of the comic. That is indeed the point – in a little verse ...”

“... Benn is fashionably unfashionable. The smoking classes have had no better champion since John Wayne. The nation’s youth have another icon on which to click. What makes his resuscitation the more beguiling is that New Labour’s project has been built on an emphatic rejection of Bennism. In 1981, backed by the hard Left in the unions and the ...”

“... this wasn’t the message the Reagan administration wanted to hear and he was quickly replaced by John Negroponte, a conservative hardliner. Negroponte began to consolidate Honduras as a client state of the US and the base from which the Contra war against Nicaragua was directed. When he became ambassador, US military assistance to Honduras was four million ...”

“... or less for City workers, not to mention Essex men and girls. After monarchs, ranging from King John, whose hunting lodge was at Writtle, to Henry VIII, who built New Hall at Boreham (still standing), came Elizabethan lord chancellors (one is buried at Saffron Walden, another at Felsted) and Georgian lord mayors and City luminaries (too many to list). Their ...”

“... of the empty cosmos, of the unfeelingness of causal connections, I concluded that this message of brown and purple blotches on a background of browny-white had been intended just for me.’ In both of O’Hanlon’s chronicles of his chaotic river jaunts, the first down the Rajang river in Borneo, this between the Orinoco and the Amazon, bird-watching ...”

“... authorship must surely have been collective, the planning long-term and meticulous. The killing of John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963, or the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York in 2001, are the two major vortices into which conspiracy theorists have been sucked in our own time, generating ever more elaborate explanations and ...”

“... But the Treasury can hardly be accused of being self-deceived by acting in this way: Gordon Brown is not like those 16th-century Spanish monarchs who insisted that the interest payments on their debts should be left off their accounts because they found it too demeaning to be reminded of them. Brown is attempting to ...”

“... town with the hill and the old castle above it in a cup in the hills with the mountains beyond, brown mountains with a little green on their slopes. Both writers, as it happens, are writing about Italy. Both writers use one word three times (‘green’ for Hemingway, ‘primroses’ for Lawrence), and repeat two other words. Hemingway’s passage is ...”

“... natural-history keeper staged annual cremations of Sloane’s decaying entomological specimens. John Cannon, an eminent plant taxonomist, reveals that after contemplating Sloane’s herbarium ‘one is left with a slight nagging feeling of anti-climax’ because the collector had the misfortune to live just before taxonomy became a proper science with ...”