“... the outstanding individual, someone whose outsize talent can carry the weaker players. When LeBron James moves from city to city, the teams he plays for rise and fall with him. Obama was so much more talented than anyone else around – so smart, so eloquent, so cool under pressure – that his teammates must have hoped he could do the same for them. Golf is ...”

“... isn’t like that,’ they’re off the hook. 20 February. We’re gradually assembling a class: James Corden, who’s plump and funny and at the audition entirely takes charge; Sacha Dhawan, an Asian boy from Manchester who complains that all he’s ever offered these days are Muslim terrorists or Afghan refugees; Jamie Parker, who is to play Scripps the ...”

“... his wife, Eliza Wilson, Walter remained a key figure in Stuckey’s. Eliza was the daughter of James Wilson, the owner-founder of the Economist, who also became Palmerston’s financial secretary to the Treasury. Wilson, a genial, acute, hard-driving Scot, was then picked out to rescue the finances of India after the Mutiny of 1857, which he did with a ...”

“... obsessives, novelists (Hilary Mantel, Sarah Waters, Madeline Miller), classicists (Robin Lane Fox, Bettany Hughes), historians (Tom Holland), who salute her muscular resurrections of the classical world, and gay men who see her as a pioneer in her writing about homosexual relationships. Along with hundreds of other gay men, many of them closeted, the ...”

“... as its ‘political and poetic undertones’ really ‘passed him by’. He was at Stowe when James Gibbs built the Temple of Liberty. This curious triangular, turreted, ironstone building with battlements on the outside and elaborate spurious heraldry on the inside, connecting Lord Cobham with his Saxon ancestors and their ancient freedoms, was the ...”

“... shires, it turned out that the railways could energise, commercialise and broaden participation in fox hunting. Casual hunters were able to pay their dues and whizz off for a weekend’s hunting like modern middle-class city dwellers flying easyJet to the Alps for a skiing minibreak: A Londoner could hunt six days a week in season, meets being arranged on ...”

“... that Shakespeare was a kindred spirit after all, at his best anyway. In The Lion and the Fox (1927), at once a dazzlingly counterintuitive study of Shakespeare and an oblique self-portrait, Lewis set out to abolish ‘gentle Shakespeare’ and to offer in his place an author who loathed the action-man tragic heroes whom he depicted and whom it was ...”

“... gay German cinema, despite Fassbinder’s lack of interest in male homosexuality as a subject (Fox and His Friends is his only gay film about men). France represents a different social configuration. There are many outstanding gay writers – Dominique Fernandez, Tony Duvert, Renaud Camus, as well as several who have died in the last decade, such as Hervé ...”

“... Muggleton’s methodology, as a sectarian leader, bore resemblances to the methods of George Fox and other early Quakers, as investigated most recently by Kate Peters in Print Culture and the Early Quakers; with the significant exception that Muggleton and his followers were rather more likely to go in for a kind of ritual cursing of those deemed to be ...”

“... and psychological consequences of the collapse of the old order’, as the Highland historian James Hunter put it). I prefer to think of it as a revolution in feeling. It absorbed the unfathomable excitements and terrors of a turbulent age, of displacement and famine and emigration and landlessness. Before the Disruption, it was led not by ministers but ...”

“... was the scene of a ‘strange and recurring tragedy’ which provided the point of departure for James Frazer’s anthropological classic, The Golden Bough. The grove was guarded by a wary figure, a priest and a murderer, ever on his guard against an assailant who would try to murder him in order to take his place: ‘Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A ...”

“... connections between them. Perhaps it is possible to construct a liberal argument from what James McGilvray calls linguistic ‘internalism’ and ‘nativism’. Internalism is the rejection of linguistic behaviourism. It denies that a language-user’s competence can be reduced to observable linguistic performance. Nativism holds that linguistic ...”

“... most capable military leader, got caught out. Ever since his arrival in France, the Desert Fox had worried about the physical and mental preparedness of his troops. Like other senior military figures, he had criticised the luxurious lifestyle of German officers in Paris: their Etappengeist, the ‘spirit of the rear lines’, was in contrast to the ...”

“... teenagers across the country (at almost the same time, Michael Gove was sending copies of the King James Bible, with a foreword by himself, to every school in England). The government also passed a law allowing it to appoint judges even if the opposition disagreed, and seven judges loyal to Fidesz duly joined the Constitutional Court. Orbán called this the ...”

“... version of Bright Lights, Big City, an appalling adaptation with wholesome munchkin Michael J. Fox in the lead. Like the film of Less than Zero, it was neutered by Hollywood’s supine acquiescence in Nancy Reagan’s demand that movies and television should not ‘glorify’ drug-taking. The jagged blackness of the original text was surrendered, together ...”