“... blusters and bungles away, the Peter Principle made flesh. Other ministers – Alan Milburn, David Blunkett, Stephen Byers – briefly shoot skywards, flare and fizzle. Through the passing show Mullin is by turns wryly amused and appalled, but often just alienated, a Meursault of the red boxes. Despite his Bennite past, the alienation is not mainly ...”

“... which reduce us to an oppressed half-life from which we break out at our peril. Childhood may be relatively happy – it offers, as the young narrator Marcus tells us in Indignation, ‘unimperilled, unchanging days when everybody felt safe and settled in his place’ – but as soon as the sex instinct kicks in, parental protectiveness turns into ...”

“... volumes had included many sentimental or chirpy verses, they had also contained ‘Goliath and David’, a rewriting of the story in Goliath’s favour which anticipates Graves’s many debunkings of history, from My Head, My Head! (1925) to King Jesus (1946), of which Goodbye to All That is one. In the ‘Familiar Letter to Siegfried Sassoon’, written ...”

“... is one source for the Hanged Man tarot card. All these examples attest to what the art historian David Freedberg calls ‘the power of images’, which more puritanical critics might see as fetishism writ large. ‘To be adored or punished, to be welcomed, dreaded, or expelled,’ Heller-Roazen concludes, ‘the image of the absentee is each time ...”

“... satin and Egyptian beads, and was painted by Augustus John in silks that don’t look too dusty. David Piper called it ‘the only existing humane portrait of a Lady Don’ and Harrison was pleased, thinking she looked ‘like a distinguished prize-fighter who has had a vision and collapsed under it’. Wade’s account of her life is in tune with the ...”

“... on board the Bahraini-flagged MV Aman, at anchor in the Gulf of Suez. Aisha had been hired in May 2017 as the Aman’s first mate. The ship was owned by a Bahraini company called Tylos Shipping and Marine Services, and operated by a crew of sixteen men from Egypt, India and Syria. According to an ITF report, the Aman was arrested in November 2017 (under ...”

“... man’s Providentially-assisted recovery of pre-lapsarian wisdom, has led us to expect). It may therefore be preferable to regard the idea as a final prophetic warning to modern man, a plea for the preservation of religious authority against the corrosive effects of scepticism. Lilla has written a substantial and scholarly book, even if he ...”

“... sent five thousand marines to Lebanon, and not a hair out of place. Dear Ike. This distinction may be a helpful one. Though Eisenhower might have been a moral coward on matters such as McCarthyism and segregation, he often expressed himself in private as a prisoner of public opinion and regarded colleagues like Nixon, for example, as distasteful political ...”

“... out. She calls Jigsaw, which has to do with her own early life, ‘a biographical novel’; and it may not be a coincidence that the book’s most sympathetic reviewers have been those who seem already to know her life story. ‘Truth,’ one of the characters remarks, ‘is such a feeble excuse for so many things.’ Bedford, always inclined to look down her ...”

“... to save them from starving.’ But the story did not end there. When in 2002 the home secretary, David Blunkett, slipped into a bill a provision expressly empowering such action, the Human Rights Act required him to include a safety-net provision that the use of the power was not to result in inhuman or degrading treatment of the destitute. Mr Justice ...”

“... football clubs. Vinai Venkatesham, CEO of Arsenal until last year, isn’t included (though this may change now he has an OBE), nor is the club’s American owner. There was, however, an entry for the late Sir Chips Keswick, a former club chairman, educated at Eton, son-in-law of the earl of Dalhousie and a director of the Bank of England. Sometimes Who’s ...”

“... through the gamuts for them all. And there was a martyred boy who stood in the bitter wind outside David Greig’s, his blue hands full of cracked eggs. For him I nursed an uplifting passion. I’m not sure that I didn’t rejoice in his suffering as a means to my salvation. Autobiography is an act of self-love, and Barker seems to have none. No more does she ...”

“... democrats who do not believe it is necessary to talk proper to be a social democrat; Gaitskell may well have been mellowing in his last months. Yet unless (as many Tories, indeed, believe) God is a Tory, one can only see the special cruelty of death as pointing up Labour’s chronic shortage of convincing leadership candidates. Arguably, the class and ...”

“... to personal abuse than most men.’ Characteristically, she does not whinge about this; but it may help explain her own steely determination, and often her unrelenting hardness, as a defence mechanism. Moreover, as a woman she still felt a sense of alienation from this particularly male-dominated club. Again, rather than vainly seeking acceptance, she ...”

“... for something in particular, and moreover to be disappointed at not finding it.Of course, you may object, this story is too elaborate. Too ‘conspiratorial’. If the rozzers want to do an old-fashioned fit-up, they can simply produce the letter from one of their own pockets, hand it to the suspect so as to get some fingerprints, and then ...”