“... Many critics cannot credit this. Stanza 56 of Speech! Speech! was singled out as evidence, by Nicholas Lezard in the Guardian: Flanders poppy no trial variant. Does my bad breath offend you? Pick a name of the unknown ypres master l as alias. Abandoned mark iv tanks, rostered by sex, Marlbrough s’en va-t-en . . . frozen mud wrestlers entertaining the ...”

“... polity he envisioned: fruitful, multicultural and economically prosperous. The city offered the best port on the Egyptian Mediterranean, and essentially the only point of access to the breadbasket of the Delta and the inland Nile. After Alexander’s death, Soter, one of his generals, made the city the capital of the Ptolemy dynasty, a suitable location for ...”

“... Hitler? The answer in both cases is Adolf Hitler. If you can buy them, Nazi memorabilia are your best hedge against inflation. Their value increases by about 20 per cent a year. But they are probably too expensive for you. A standard-issue SS dress dagger is worth at least $1500. A lock of Eva Braun’s hair will cost you $3500. A small watercolour possibly ...”

“... Papers. This presented a Freudian analysis of the personal papers published in those volumes. Nicholas Griffin’s Russell’s Idealist Apprenticeship has a similar genesis, although in terms of philosophical sophistication and scholarly meticulousness it is a much weightier proposition. Griffin is a philosophy professor at McMaster and was one of the ...”

“... novel, hence her call to Twentieth Century-Fox. When she was four or five Didion took her to see Nicholas and Alexandra and when Didion asked her how she had liked it she said: ‘I think it’s going to be a big hit.’ ‘Was this confusion about where she stood in the chronological scheme of things our doing?’ Didion asks and I suppose one might wonder ...”

“... Throughout the 1540s and into the 1550s, he was figurehead and spiritual counsellor to some of the best minds and most ardent spirits of the Italian Counter-Reformation, including Giovanni Morone and Vittoria Colonna, and he commanded the respect even of those, like Marcello Cervini, the future Papa Marcello, who favoured a harder and sterner version of ...”

“... excellent recent historico-philosophical studies of particular topics – I think, for example, of Nicholas Jolley’s Leibniz and Locke (1984) and The Light of the Soul: Theories of Ideas in Leibniz, Malebranche and Descartes (1990), the latter a rich source of origins that was published too late for Ayers to use. But there has hitherto been no work that a ...”

“... of power than had been seen at Vienna in 1815, where restoration of the balance of power was the best that could be hoped for. The principle of self-determination would now at last be realised across Europe. This was not to be an improvised affair. The British delegation’s composition and logistics had been calculated well in advance and to the finest ...”

“... a firm sense of their traditional rights. People knew that the governing class would take the very best things from a wreck, but that still left a share for the common coaster. A mouthful of raisins, with only a little gravel in your teeth.Legally speaking, the Golden Grape was not a true ‘wreck’. Medieval statutes, still in use in the 17th ...”

“... that had not changed by 1553. So it was perfectly plausible for Protestants to see Jane as the best legitimate heir. Both the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, and the Bishop of London, Nicholas Ridley, openly and precisely said that both Mary and Elizabeth were bastards. Mary’s remarkable initial success came ...”

“... officials prevaricate or lie has trained him to make proper use of an investigative journalist’s best source: the leak.The list of known names of government employees who for moral and patriotic reasons have broken their duty of silence – and often their pledge under the Official Secrets Acts – is impressive. Some would call it a roll of honour. From ...”

“... their makers was manifest in the published results of a recent Time Out poll to choose the ‘100 Best Films’ and with them a ‘Best Director’, ‘Best Actress’ and ‘Best Actor’. (‘Best Female Star’ and ...”

“... antagonist, Hugh MacDiarmid, puts in an appearance early on. MacDiarmid had been Finlay’s best man, but when Finlay published Glasgow Beasts, an’ a Burd in 1961 the pioneer of synthetic Scots was scandalised by its demotic Glaswegian, and went on the attack with a pamphlet, The Ugly Birds without Wings. His ire was unquenched four years ...”

“... the stem – in some other ancillary tasks and in cigarette-making, not much in cigar-rolling. The best jobs went to whites: ‘Stringent requirements needed to be met to become a master cigar-maker, sorter or box-decorator, as entry into the cream of the cigar trades became restricted along race and craft lines, as much by the white workers as the ...”

“... as a place to work – ‘there was cheerful, productive anarchy; everyone did what they loved best,’ the composer and one-time producer, Alexander Goehr remembers – and as a medium for listening to. Peter Maxwell Davies recalls how, as a boy on a council estate in Swinton, he would listen ‘every evening, more or less from the moment it started till ...”