“... they are only slightly more so than my aunties’ insistence that we are descended from Sir Robert Peel, or my own thought, once voiced at Gilpin Place and briskly squashed by Dad, that Uncle Clarence, my mother’s brother killed in the First War, might be the Unknown Soldier.I still have much of Aunt Eveline’s music, albums covered in brown ...”

“... naive to have misgivings about using Keats for anecdotes in which he himself figured as the nobly self-sacrificing friend and witness. These sentimentalities he communicated to Shelley, who, less naive, used them to concoct in the elegy ‘Adonais’ a version of Keats as a ‘young flower … blighted in the bud’, a hapless youth attended in his need by ...”

“... a manner shaped for other purposes by the Augustan satirists, urbanely interventionist rather than self-effacing, and designed to indicate authorial management rather than to induce an illusion of unprocessed reality. This is even true of Shamela, which is written in Richardson’s letter-form and thus ostensibly cuts out the author. It is an example of a ...”

“... were in their dying phases and both Armenians and Azerbaijanis discovered the idea of national self-determination’. Since then, dubious historical narratives and the jargon of 19th-century nationalism have been deployed to reinforce a mutual antipathy.Nagorno-Karabakh​ – Nagorny, Russian for ‘mountainous’; Kara-Bakh, Turkish for ‘black ...”

“... yet elusive aspects of cultural change is the way certain ideals and arguments acquire an almost self-evident power at particular times, just as others come to seem irrelevant or antiquated and largely disappear from public debate. In the middle of the 18th century, to describe a measure as ‘displaying the respect that is due to rank’ was a commonplace ...”

“... Genet, Robbe-Grillet was now to be found in second-hand bookshops. Passionately anti-clerical, a self-confessed sadist, Robbe-Grillet had always relished his unofficial title, the ‘pope of the nouveau roman’, but now the joke was wearing thin: no one wants to lead a church without a congregation. His parting gesture was to preside over a black mass. He ...”

“... their behaviour over the Polish border), their obsession with themselves, a strong inclination to self-pity, and a longing to be liked.’ Other qualities discussed included German ‘angst, aggressiveness, assertiveness, bullying, egotism, inferiority complex, sentimentality’. Powell later said he regretted writing this down, not because it didn’t ...”

“... a work co-authored by two pillars of the foreign policy establishment of the time, Joseph Nye and Robert Keohane, whose first edition – it went through many – appeared in 1977. Though presented as a system of norms and expectations that helped assure continuity between different administrations in Washington by introducing ‘greater discipline’ into ...”

“... and now began to write for publication – humorous essays and sketches at first, in the manner of Robert Benchley. ‘I dislike night life and clubs,’ he told a friend in a letter. He refused to push to the front of the line at fancy restaurants by telling the head waiter who he was. Ruth was put out by the show of intractability, which she rightly saw as ...”

“... to have run into feminist theory in some form or other. She needed re-education, constructive self-criticism. But women of all classes watched these films, and they could all get the message. Films are much more likely to be overtly macho and misogynistic than television programmes. Men dictate what films they, their girlfriends and their families will ...”

“... politics we got the PUP and the UDP. They have been joined by the barrister-turned-politician, Robert McCartney who, along with Conor Cruise O’Brien, founded the UKUP (that rogue ‘K’ is for ‘Kingdom’), to oppose further UUP sell-outs and the mayhem of a united Ireland. In last month’s Assembly elections there were also candidates who variously ...”

“... creating unity; only its content was different. Two of Durkheim’s followers, the anthropologists Robert Hertz and Arnold Van Gennep, provide Ben-Amos with the narrative for the ‘Culture’ section. Hertz argued that the death of an individual was the death of a social being and thus a blow to the social order. The community healed this wound by means of ...”

“... Rocks & Mountains’, found in a manuscript collection of settings by the Jacobean lutenist Robert Johnson (who is not to be confused with the Tudor church musician of that name, or indeed with the great Delta blues singer of the 1930s). Johnson is known to have composed music for King’s Men productions, and his beautiful settings of Ariel’s songs ...”

“... were appalled later at the White House’s initial insistence that they had shot bin Laden in self-defence, the retired official said. ‘Six of the Seals’ finest, most experienced NCOs, faced with an unarmed elderly civilian, had to kill him in self-defence? The house was shabby and bin Laden was living in a cell ...”

“... enthusiasm. But when he came to write The New Few, an assault on Britain’s fall into the grip of self-seeking oligarchies of one kind or another, he made it clear that the EU was a still more extreme case of the same disease, in a chapter entitled ‘Stuck on the Eurostar’. These European symptoms didn’t leave Britain unaffected. ‘Belonging to the EU ...”