“... finding a place for transcendent values, must be the pursuit of English novelists.’ It is William Golding who comes top here: he has ‘wed his sense of a transcendent evil and good to the fully felt social novel that the English have constructed in their great tradition’. Few people will dissent, I imagine, from this rating of Mr Golding. It must ...”

“... with a big infusion of aid from more than forty independent donor organisations – $30 million in cash and kind since the height of the drought – are bringing the EPLF steadily closer to its objective of a new social order. Since many of these receipts are earmarked for development projects rather than simple emergency food relief, the EPLF can also claim ...”

“... to forestall the ‘Lord Archer wins the lottery’, ‘lucky Stephen King’, or ‘not more cash for Martin’ reactions. Conservative values and Good English (virtues that Sir Kingsley and the Times share) would be the prime beneficiaries of the shattered book agreement. Inside, the op-ed page was dominated by a gloating ‘Good Riddance to the Net ...”

“... I was a student, fought hard against racial segregation. Today, its vice-chancellor, Malegaparu William Makgoba, compares white males to superannuated apes, creatures who have for ever lost their place in the evolutionary tree. The only salvation for them, he says, is to learn to sing, dance, eat, dress and in every other way behave as Africans; only then ...”

“... received Paul’s severed ear in the post. Bill helped put the ransom together: $2.9 million in cash, negotiated down from an initial demand of $17 million (eminently affordable, but why overpay?) and structured to be mostly tax-deductible. One of Gavin Newsom’s earliest memories is of riding in a car with Paul Getty to go Christmas shopping, under ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!”’ The writer A ...”

“... their pre-Reformation forbears to study Catholic theology, they were taught the classical Latin of William Lyly’s prescribed Short Introduction of Grammar – the language of pagans, taught with pagan texts. In order to win the Parker Scholarship to Cambridge, moreover, Marlowe would have had to have learned two arts to a much higher level than was required ...”

“... finished novel, Troubles, which took shape rapidly and was published in 1970, winning praise from William Trevor and Elizabeth Bowen. ‘If I had bothered to look at [my] diary,’ he noted two months after its publication, ‘I wd also have used the “flight of stone steps leading up into thin air”, which I simply forgot.’ He had added a detail to his ...”

“... a brilliant machine for the generation of property rights. Security of title was crucial. As Sir William Petty, that ingenious pioneer of statistics who himself acquired huge estates in Ireland, pointed out, ‘there can be no incouragement to industry, where there is no assurance of what shall be gotten by it.’ Jefferson was the Founding Father most ...”

“... and stewing; they are sweating all over; they are absolutely pining and dying for a Plot!’ So William Cobbett wrote to Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt in 1816. He did not exaggerate. The verb ‘foment’ might have been invented to describe the activities of Lords Sidmouth and Castlereagh and their spymasters in Bow Street during the turbulent 1810s. Seldom in ...”

“... right-wing policies. It is remarkable in these circumstances that anyone wants to succeed William Hague as leader. What should he or she do? The most obvious strategy is just to hang on. The Conservatives are the official opposition and one of the two major parties of the state. The presumption must be that sooner or later Labour will falter and the ...”

“... and of an increasingly manifest destiny becomes unmistakable. Sceptics such as the historian William Bouwsma have argued that even the roi soleil did not always get his own way. Monarchs who wanted to throw their weight about remained as short of cash as ever. Even under Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the greatest of ...”

“... as relatively standard cases of the urge to ‘be a man’. Leave it to the genteel types – William James being another and later example – to mistake manhood for the capacity to endure pre-arranged physical hardship. Their version, no doubt, of the English public school. It will be obvious that Leverenz likes to stay close to home – as with ...”

“... practice. Many Scottish writers since Dunbar in the 15th century have avoided starvation by taking cash and cottages from noble patrons. But most of those writers have found ways to bite the feeding hand (yet not so hard that it is withdrawn). This pattern was still noticeable in the 20th century, as radical poets accepted handouts from kindly ...”

“... paper that although one of her professors at Stanford had been Clinton’s defence secretary, William Perry, her ‘dream job’ was to be national security adviser. She knew Korean and was studying Mandarin: as a student she had published articles about North Korean counterfeiters and smuggling networks. So on paper she fitted in with all the other ...”