“... by her appeal as a Dorothy Doolittle and queer icon. Her paintings languish in the reserves of major museums, while in Paris her name mostly evokes the euphoric gay club in Buttes-Chaumont park. Bonheur’s vast body of work is surprisingly various, both in medium and subject (some of her landscapes without animals are exceptional). Being so commercially ...”

“... expected to be strictly apolitical; the independence of the judiciary is considered sacrosanct. John Rawls went to extraordinary lengths to imagine an ‘original position’ in which everyone would be capable of agreeing on the principles of social justice: in it, each of us would be ignorant of our own social status and effectively function as an outside ...”

“... Proms. Think Morning Service at the village church, carols from King’s College Cambridge, Elton John singing to the nation from Westminster Abbey. Think popular music in general and, when Plato brings in a parallel from the visual arts, forget the Tate Gallery and recall the advertisements that surround us everywhere. Above all, think about the way all this ...”

“... be rejected. Her second choice was Brandeis, known at the time as ‘Jew U’. She was a classics major, and her reading is evident in her adult work: there’s Propertius, Catullus, her Eurydice in the Underworld, and so on. She was fond of claiming that classical authors had never seen the need for originality in their narratives, so why should she?Acker ...”

“... doubly private. Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government wasn’t going to nationalise a major industry if it could help it. The state bookmaker (the Tote, which operated on the French system of pooling bets) was forced to compete for custom with privately owned rivals, which could offer more tempting fixed odds. But the British government wasn’t ...”

“... by reference to the legal principles which undoubtedly explain them the kinds of award made in major libel actions. There is nothing wrong with the argument that if this is the due result there is something wrong with the principles or the process that have produced it. Refusing to accept the objectionable outcome alongside the welcome one is not simply ...”

“... engine types, guidance systems and fuel consumption. In 1950, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had explained the inevitability of federation in terms that every adult Eritrean can retrieve, more or less correctly, from somewhere in the mental files: ‘From the point of view of justice, the opinions of the Eritrean people must receive ...”

“... he would have been disappointed. There was some half-hearted praise from Movement types, but when John Carey, for example, needed an honourable popular writer to batter the highbrows with in The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), he turned to Arnold Bennett. Morgan’s biography had a memorable centrepiece: a description of the senile Maugham crapping on ...”

“... and Josephine abandoned their new house, and in the autumn of 1906 moved to 4 Marlborough Road, St John’s Wood, where they spent the rest of their lives. A photo taken in the back garden shows Chester wearing a suit, Josephine in a deckchair. It wasn’t Crag Head. The garden had a single pear tree, which they jokingly called ‘the orchard’. In 1908 ...”

“... wave of appointees also included one who was, in the words of an admirer, Europe’s equivalent of John Marshall, the patriarch of the Supreme Court in the US, responsible for establishing its authority across the land. Robert Lecourt was a leading politician in the French version of the Christian Democratic parties of Italy and Germany, the Mouvement ...”

“... work of the American E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Foundation, said to be a major influence on Gove. So long as your performance data look good and you did well in your most recent Ofsted inspection, the DfE doesn’t worry too much how you got there. (Both measures looked great at Park View until recently, which may be one reason things ...”

“... them, when they caught the wrong fish, to dump it.As I listened to Hardie I thought of something John Fenty, the local businessman who owns Grimsby Town football club, had told me a couple of days earlier: how he got his start in 1984 hiring transport out to a local trader who drove around the colliery villages inland, selling fish factory discards to ...”

“... of ‘Notes towards ... ’, on disarming criticism by pre-emptive apology. But in the words of John Wayne, ‘Sorry doesn’t get it done.’ Thus he writes, ‘(This really has the makings of a Mills & Boon)’ – but lets it stand. He inserts a footnote in a scene between Philip and his rival for Melissa: ‘It is difficult to render simultaneity in ...”

“... indeed sometimes rather skeletal political history. Drawing above all from the speeches of the major revolutionaries, he is thin on popular attitudes towards the British, and on opinion in the Army. There is also little on literary depiction of the English, or on caricature (admittedly, the French had nothing to compare with the ferocious hilarity of ...”