“... and bank balance, are not recorded in the preliminary notes on contributors) would seem to be keen on giving us facts, but his own idea of a fact is that ‘since the Second World War’ there has been a determined effort to keep texts out of the art museum. The truth is that there has been a steady increase in helpful information available in ...”

“... is dead. The second QC brought in to prosecute Judith Ward, then a rising star at the bar called Peter Taylor QC, is now the Lord Chief Justice. From his office and from that of Mr Walsh there has been not a single expression of explanation or regret about the conviction of Judith Ward as a result of their own failure to disclose the evidence which might ...”

“... that anyone could refer to.’ This has been a great and perhaps painful discovery for him. Peter Strawson spoke for the opposite style of thinking when he wrote over thirty years ago in Individuals that ‘the idea of an “exhaustive description” is in fact quite meaningless in general, although sense may be given to it in a particular context of ...”

“... for Queen Victoria, as far as Public Life is concerned’: yet by no means a solemn fellow, keen on sport and having an enduring love-affair with fast cars. (He wrote a piece on them later for Mademoiselle called ‘Go, Man, Go!’) Lowell regarded his opinions as a touchstone, and remained unoffended by Jarrell’s view that in the long poem ‘The ...”

“... Jackson. Such high-profile acquisitions are seized upon by opportunistic commentators, all too keen to foster suspicions of Japanese duplicity, racism and greed. Writing about Japan, its society and its foreign affairs has to an overwhelming degree become the preserve of alarmist political economists. Yet who is served by the perpetuation of the simplistic ...”

“... of what became known as Supergun. At once they prosecuted the people they thought responsible: Peter Mitchell, managing director of the firm Walter Somers, which made the barrel, and a Bristol engineer, Chris Cowley, who had worked on the Supergun project in Iraq. The massive steel structures they had seized at Teesport provided Customs officers with the ...”

“... where else do you get a name like that?’ To us cocky British snobs who call the great man ‘Sir Peter Paul Rubens’ and don’t much mind what he called himself, the ‘mistake’ of the tourists is not tragical. But, for William Gaddis, this sort of ignorance leads up to the climax of The Recognitions, where his most admirable character – Stanley, the ...”

“... the 5th Earl Russell defied most conventional stereotypes of the aristocrat. But he possessed a keen awareness of his dynastic heritage: it determined both his sense of political obligation and his interpretation of English history. The story of the Russells was inextricably interwoven with the history of Whiggery and Liberalism, and after some early ...”

“... never get through it in four days.’‘Then ask the judge,’ I said to him. ‘If she’s not keen on hearing it, nothing I can say will make it happen.’A desperate tone entered his voice. ‘Come on, Mr Renton, you and me. We’ve fought the good fight and fairly. I mean, if you were the one asking me …’I sighed. Mr Bowls was right, he’s always ...”

“... on the front showing the big gain going to the poorest 10 per cent.’ Brown wasn’t always keen for the egalitarian consequences of his policies to be advertised. Like Blair and New Labour generally, he feared both the right-wing press and the harsh assumptions of many voters that these papers helped form and sustain. While Macintyre says that Brown is ...”

“... out on air to fifteen million listeners by the right-wing talk-radio personality Rush Limbaugh. Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, is a disciple of Straussianism, and his protégé J.D. Vance has spoken at Claremont Institute events. The attempted election grab of 2020-21 has been described as ‘a coup in search of a legal theory’: John ...”

“... very close to Pushkin, who combined a streak of robust, almost jingoistic patriotism with a keen sense for the arrogant ugliness of absolute power’. The translation of Eugene Onegin suggests a slightly different mix: a benign unforced urbanity, the mark of a civilised unaggressive sensibility which is never soft, though it is sometimes lax as Byron ...”

“... the attempt made in the mid-Eighties by the millionaire property developer and art collector Peter Palumbo to extend his power as chairman of the trustees and to reduce the role of the director, Alan Bowness, to that of a manager. The political circumstances in which this coup nearly succeeded are not neglected, but more context and commentary are ...”

“... invited Mrs Simpson, who was then his paramour. The company he kept in London burgeoned with keen young supporters of the Nazi ‘experiment’. Edward (‘Fruity’) Metcalfe, one of his closest friends, and the best man at his wedding to Wallis, appeared in the Tatler dressed up in Fascist regalia at a ‘Blackshirt’ dinner. When the Foreign ...”

“... R.H. Robins; and investigate the cultural significance of dictionaries, whether in education (Peter Strevens on Learner’s Dictionaries), in the celebration of a national consciousness (Dr Ramson), in the geographical diffusion of a vocabulary (the admirable Frederic Cassidy on the Dictionary of American Regional English), or in the historical tradition ...”