“... felt completely unselfconscious.’ Then there is Tommy or Tommie or Tony Hyndman, also a lover of Stephen Spender’s (who calls him Jimmy Younger in World within World) and a character in T.C. Worseley’s autobiographical novel Fellow Travellers (Worseley calls him Harry Watson). But Strachan’s intention is always to give Redgrave the benefit of his own ...”

“... to John Deaton, and was committed for trial. James Ryall, John Burridge, John White and Thomas Wall were re-examined for passing counterfeit coin but were discharged for lack of evidence. The last man up, Joseph Greenfield, was remanded till Monday for stealing a quantity of nails, ‘the property of some person unknown’. The only man who had not ...”

“... a police constable, later identified as James Scottow, go over to him. Peach was leaning against a wall and Scottow, who said he thought Peach was hiding from the police charge, shouted at him to move on. (A police internal investigation found that, given the ‘confusion and general tension’, Scottow had not neglected his duty towards Peach.) Peach was ...”

“... the legends of Faust and Don Juan) to symbolise the ascending and falling fortunes of Juan, Stephen and Bloom. This notion of the comprehensiveness of art derives from idealists like F.H. Bradley, and Hermione de Almeida’s aesthetic principles have much in common with those of Pound and Eliot. They belong in an intellectual ambience appropriate for ...”

“... Englishman and a brilliant ship’s captain but a blunderer on land, strikes up a friendship with Stephen Maturin, an introverted Irish-Catalan doctor whom he takes aboard as a surgeon. There are naval battles and lengthy explanations of different types of sail and other nautical details. But the plotting – at least in a narrow, screenwriterly sense – is ...”

“... by a famous general and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, by a decent preponderance of Wall Street, and by the mainstream media, whose resources he deploys and channels with a relentlessness no other president has approached. Barack Obama, in the first 392 days of his presidency, put himself on public view for ...”

“... of all nations, but Russia in particular, are the movers in that market, and Trump’s credit on Wall Street ran out long ago. Russian money is probably behind some of his precarious loans; and the Russian government keeps track of Russian money. But the US media, and a great many Democrats with them, have been running far ahead of the game and treating the ...”

“... seems to amount to a solid confirmation of the Blood for Oil argument: the Iraq invasion was, the Wall Street Journal said, ‘one of the most audacious hostile takeovers ever’. Perhaps, but the argument is multi-layered and sometimes inconsistent. Blood for Oil could mean that the war was a response to oil shortage, or to machinations by the ...”

“... Bryan Carsberg of Oftel smiles up in soft brown light as he dangles in the mirror on a green office wall. Michael Meyer of Emess Lighting is dissected by the blinds that cut across him and then reassembled from outside – his shirtsleeved figure looming like a target in the formulaic eye of some Hollywood assassin ...”

“... and the ‘right rose tree’. It is, as he said, also ‘liable to bias’. The Queen at the wall in Ireland was not entirely unlike Willy Brandt at the Ghetto memorial. Whether ‘the ultimate reality must be anarchy’ who can presume to say? ‘Tradition is kindred’: perhaps that is true; perhaps a great cross-roaded mind has blundered: ‘nadir ...”

“... heard the President say: ‘We have a clear path forward.’ I heard that Halliburton had built a wall around the Green Zone, made of 12-foot-high, five-ton concrete slabs, topped with concertina wire. I heard that mortars fired into the Green Zone often fell short and landed in the neighbourhoods just outside the wall, and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for us now are some very familiar names – Jonathan Culler, Christopher Norris, Annette Lavers, Stephen Heath etc – and under his guidance, we gather, they all got on extremely well, ‘preserving a tone of good humour in the midst of the most serious, even the most fierce, exchanges’. Kermode remained, as he declared in Continuities, ‘more in favour ...”

“... in his fiction that has attracted criticism from other South African writers, such as Gordimer and Stephen Watson. Watson has objected that Coetzee’s concern with textuality means that his work is ‘little more than an artfully constructed void’, while Gordimer has identified as a weakness what she calls his ‘revulsion against all political and ...”

“... is lacking in existing family or care settings’. In 1997, in their book A Class Act, Adonis and Stephen Pollard argued that a new ‘Super Class’ of City gents and private sector professionals was emerging and that the educational system was central to this. The middle classes were leaving the state sector while everyone else was confined to those ...”