“... allies in the City establishment, but it is striking that when he received a knighthood in 1966, Lord Cromer, the governor of the Bank, opposed the honour on the specious grounds that while Warburg might have been ‘very successful in his own affairs’, he had not made ‘any outstanding contribution to the common weal of the City’. In his last decade ...”

“... a mouse, Is Michael Foot, who now speaks for the nation In this alleged Hour of Humiliation. Lord Carrington presents the dazed PM With his own head upon a point of honour. The nitwit Nott stays at his post pro tem Though in the long term he must be a goner. Poor Thatcher makes a mighty show of phlegm At all the bad luck that’s been heaped upon ...”

“... away To show the thick foundation wanly glowing, Cracked by his smile of disbelief at meeting Lord Hailsham dressed for the official greeting. If Reagan’s jet-black hair seems slightly strange, What about Hailsham’s wig, sword, socks and cape? The President when dressed to ride the range Looks weird, but not as if he’s going ape. For Reagan it ...”

“... people free. Perhaps a phantom quest’s the one sane goal – As now the Sun claims to have found Lord Lucan In deepest jungle with tapir and toucan. The Jungle Fugitive’s a Fleet Street thriller That Martin Bormann starred in last time round. Embezzler on the lam and missing killer Swathed in lianas are abruptly found. One day no doubt they’ll bump into ...”

“... by expanding the sports coverage, introducing women’s pages and focusing on high-profile trials. James Canham Read was hanged for the murder of Florence Dennis, having slept with both her and her sister. His last words, according to the Evening News, were ‘Will it hurt?’ This was perhaps a question to which the answer was ‘Yes’. In retrospect, all ...”

“... a ‘makar’. A century later in his how-to-be-a-king book, the Basilikon Doron, the versifying James VI of Scotland claimed that he had ‘not spared to play the bairde against all the estaitis of my kingdome’. When James boarded the English throne in 1603, his Scots had to be translated for English readers to whom the ...”

“... and a lack of courage (plus an exercise in grievance politics) on the part of the SNP and its then lord advocate, James Wolffe. Wolffe refused to issue a statement confirming that it would not be in the public interest to prosecute people who injected at an SDCF. Frustrated by the situation, an activist called Peter Krykant ...”

“... Gallery, painted around 1620 when he was just out of his teens, with the Metropolitan Museum’s James Stuart, Fourth Duke of Lennox, painted in 1633. The former is a small picture: you look at it close. Threads of white paint highlight the old man’s hair, beard, watering eye and damp lip. Paint and flesh exchange substance. The same is true of a picture ...”

“... like’; ‘the objectivity of the narrator is a modern invention, we need only reflect that Our Lord God didn’t want it in His Book.’ The raft in question is the Iberian peninsula, which has seceded geologically, split off from Europe down the middle of the Pyrenees (a ‘tectonic enigma’ is what the narrator owlishly calls it), and is sailing out ...”

“... books like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, Jesmyn Ward’s anthology The Fire This Time, James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird and the poet Claudia Rankine’s award-winning Citizen. In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, on receiving the MacArthur ‘Genius’ grant, Rankine acknowledged as much: ‘To ...”

“... in whose work ordinariness achieves a highly individual and idiosyncratic literary status – James Joyce and Italo Svevo. Growing older, a bit despondent, never feeling quite well – these are the symptoms of Svevan man which we all recognise, and from which we suffer ourselves. The Svevan ordinary man belongs to no recognisable social category. Neither ...”

“... What is important, as Claudius leaves the court, is that the king, like some character in Henry James, now knows that Hamlet knows, and is armed. Perhaps more in need of notice are one or two elements that interfuse with dramaturgy, in the extraordinary brilliance of the work’s verbal style. The first occurs late in the play’s second scene. Earlier in ...”

“... Jane’s mother was Alice St John, daughter of a Bedfordshire landowner. Her father was Henry, Lord Morley, the scholarly translator of Petrarch and Plutarch. David Starkey begins an essay on Lord Morley by wondering whether we should class him like Prufrock as an ‘attendant ...”

“... of people who worked outside – and against – official Government policy. Chief among them was James Guerin, a Bible-thumping chorister-entrepreneur from Connecticut, who made a fortune by flouting his Government’s policy on arm sales – especially to South Africa and Iraq. When he was short of money in 1987, Guerin came to Britain and tricked one of ...”

“... to France and Italy which Katherine, then 29, made with her Irish neighbours and contemporaries, Lord and Lady Mount Cashell. Setting off in November 1801, they, like many other Britons, were taking advantage of the peace brought by the Treaty of Amiens to see for themselves the country of which they had heard and read such lurid accounts. Off they ...”