“... but the retention of that power is probably the most indispensable element of success.’ Sir William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, stated the contrary view a month later: ‘The attitude of some ministers is rather to find out what is the smallest amount of money and the smallest number of men with which we may hope, some day, to win ...”

“... power-base was in Lancashire, a part of England famous for clinging to Catholicism. His cousin Sir William Stanley was a notorious traitor, who after years of stalwart military service to Elizabeth had handed the Dutch town of Deventer over to the Spanish and formed a regiment in the King of Spain’s service. Lord Strange was a problem for the Government. As ...”

“... degradation worse than death’. Eventually around 110,000 former bondsmen took arms against their masters’ rebellion, equal to the total population of enslaved adult men in Virginia in 1860. Confederates struck back as hard as they could. Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States, announced the enslavement of ‘all free negroes within the limits ...”

“... accidentally, ‘always resulting on the wrong hat on the wrong head’, as their filmographer William Everson puts it. Laurel and Hardy are always at their best in the short film; the feature films would be padded out with silly plotlines, elaborate songs and screeching flappers, but the shorts are sometimes perfect, the comedy based on situations rather ...”

“... for one last favour: never to criticise the USSR.) But South Africa’s Communists were past masters at dressing their demands up in liberal clothes in order to appeal to the bien pensant international gallery. If Fischer did write Mandela’s speech, then it involved wholesale dissembling, and Sisulu was certainly dissembling too. In a way it makes ...”

“... fabulous bindings stamped with peacocks’ tails and nightingales’ eyes; it has been printed by masters for tiny private presses, handwritten and illustrated by artists – beginning with the trio of William Morris, Burne-Jones and Charles Fairfax Murray, who helped launch the work after some friends came across it in a ...”

“... Pandora’s box: all sorts of new and disruptive things will emerge to which our political masters have so far given only scant attention, in public at least. Consider​ the prospect, much vaunted by some, of a new ‘global Britain’. If this is to be anything more than a slogan, a fig-leaf for a new parochialism, all sorts of changes will be ...”

“... Man on His Horse’ and ‘The Tears of a Muse in America’ (whose original title, ‘A Muse for William Maynard’, signals its origins in a relationship with an American presumably met during his spell as a graduate student at Princeton in 1935) were possibly the poems that led Ashbery to assume Prince was gay. This assumption was strengthened when a ...”

“... him in his tracks that day in May 1910 was the startling realisation that the performances of Old Masters such as Hogarth and Gainsborough, hanging in some dining-room in Coram’s Fields, were being outstripped in quality by those of his own contemporaries. Here among his fellows, a path to genuine artistic progress was opening up.He was surprised at this ...”

“... December 1988, four months after the end of the Gulf War. Present were three government ministers, William Waldegrave from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Alan Clark from the DTI and Lord Trefgarne from Defence. On the agenda was what to do about the export of arms and arms-related equipment to the Gulf region in light of the changed circumstances brought ...”

“... can be both, you know) of Coleridge and Keats and Byron, but he seems to be particularly fond of William Blake, a poet I find crude and clumsy. Poetically Blake is as naive as he is primitive as a draughtsman: an illustrator of Biblical themes who entertains metaphysical pretensions above his station of the cross. ‘Tyger, Tyger, burning bright’ – this ...”

“... later 3rd Baron Derwent), and by joining a poetry society run by some charismatic masters. He said in his autobiography, Goodbye to All That, written in 1929 when he was only 34, that by the end of his time at Charterhouse ‘poetry and Dick were now the only two things that really mattered.’ He then survived the First World War, in ...”

“... time he deals almost too fully with the troubles of Eliot’s first marriage (compared, say, with William Empson’s very different, idiosyncratic but suggestive analysis of the filial Eliot at the period of The Waste Land) in no way affects this position. Hastings, too, takes as his subject the private life and yet gives us, as both condition and ...”

“... with his new colleagues from Brandeis. Sontag has given birth to a son, David. She studies for masters’ degrees in literature and philosophy at Harvard. Herbert Marcuse boards in their house. The tone is one of new maturity in a high-toned world, but there are also floods of tears, feelings of imprisonment, the need to die or leave. There isn’t much ...”

“... Two days filming my TV parables programme Heavenly Stories at Dulwich College, the setting the Masters’ Library, a galleried, High Victorian room adjoining the school hall, presumably where the masters foregather before assembly. Over the chimneypiece are two crude allegorical panels of Piety and Liberality, the ideals ...”