“... only interest was golf. Having created in Kennedy a glamorous genius, innumerable writers then took pleasure in demonstrating that he was both frivolous and false and in destroying his reputation with gossip. But it can be argued that Kennedy was an able leader, with a fresh and alert mind, who was respected by other world leaders. It is but simple truth ...”

“... principles’. The illustrative quotations reinforced this emphasis: ‘The term Whig,’ Lord John Russell said in the 1850s, ‘has the convenience of expressing in one syllable what Conservative Liberal expresses in seven.’ The entry ranged widely over the (mainly pejorative) extensions of the core use, including such delights, now lost, as ...”

“... then, or at least surrounded me in my own head. Sometimes it surrounds me still. One day, my mum took me into Irvine town centre in the afternoon, Kilwinning is a satellite of Irvine, the main town, as Pennyburn is a satellite of Kilwinning. We came from the station, and she brought me up to some high flats. My eyes were everywhere; the present wasn’t just ...”

“... the FBI does not normally investigate sexual assault cases.) Kavanaugh denies that the incident took place, but – although presumably an advocate of the rule of law – opposes Dr Ford’s request that there should be a further investigation by the FBI as part of its routine background checks for important government nominees. The evangelist Franklin ...”

“... in his seminal study Writing the English Republic, the language of chaos and creation briefly took on optimistic overtones during the Commonwealth, but with its disintegration the images became despairing. The Grand Concernments of England Ensured, an anonymous pamphlet which appeared in 1659, shows that the image of the Commonwealth as being created from ...”

“... an exhilarating place to imagine they’d found it, even though it would soon be in ruins. They took up propaganda work with the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, a not quite Trotskyist party of which Trotsky himself was fiercely critical. The POUM’s members (including a number of its leaders) were drawn from the Left and Right Opposition to the ...”

“... more available on tseliot.com, and many thousands yet to come. Edited for the most part by John Haffenden, the edition builds on the collection made by the late Valerie Eliot and on many archives (especially those of Faber). Occasionally, there’s a page with only a couple of lines by Old Possum on it, and about fifty lines of small-print ...”

“... knocking all the bubbles out of my Pepsi.” Beede’s knee instantly stopped its jogging. Kane took a quick swig of the imperilled beverage,’ where ‘imperilled beverage’, a phrase nobody other than Jeeves would ever use, is meant to be bathetically mock-heroic) or effortfully exuberant dialogue: ‘“We Broads got class, yeah? We got breedin’! We ...”

“... in Nagasaki Bay in 1799, as ‘an exotically situated romance of astounding vulgarity’. Hensher took issue with its mysterious, beautiful Japanese maidens and its inscrutable, silk-robed, mind-reading villain, but it would probably be more accurate to say that it was either a little too vulgar, or not quite vulgar enough. The Thousand Autumns would have ...”

“... and both echo principles shared with them by a third experimenter, the chemist and astronomer Sir John Herschel. It was Herschel who first used ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ to name the two distinct stages of photographic depiction, and Herschel whose investigations ultimately made it possible to capture the vagaries of light. In brief, what Herschel ...”

“... Waltz), the head of Spectre and by coincidence both the son and the murderer of a man who took the young Bond under his wing. Oberhauser is operating a contraption that threatens to deprive Bond of his facial recognition abilities by driving a pair of pins into the sides of his skull – a painful operation in its initial stages, as indicated by ...”

“... to track a variant’s spread. We could see Alpha gaining ground by SGTF a year ago. When Delta took over in May, SGTFs became rare. Last month SGTF became dominant in Gauteng, then elsewhere in South Africa, and there are now clear signs of a fourth wave of infections in South Africa.There was immediate action. On 26 November the World Health Organisation ...”

“... the question of what could be performed and what had to be visualised offstage. She often took an oblique approach, skirting around the traditional centres of narratives. Cleopatra (c.1633-35) is remarkable for showing the queen already dead, her body drained and greyish, the asp uncoiled beside her on the bed. Esther before Ahasuerus (c.1628-30) is ...”

“... 19th century – a good boy doesn’t throw his footman out of the window. The book is in the John Johnson Collection of Ephemera at the Bodleian, and this scene was pictured, as I recall, taking place in a panelled room – a prefects’ study, perhaps, or a dining club. Boys’ play, then. And although circumstances and contexts change, still ...”

“... wrote of his wish to ‘snatch’ a fleeting moment of beauty before the inevitable ‘change’ took place. The whole effect is, at least to modern tastes, quite revolting.Degas’s Miss Murray is different. He ignores Lawrence’s saccharine touches and the fussy details of the costume. The ground of the canvas is left visible. There is only a whisper of ...”