“... annoy their neighbours and puzzle posterity. Archaeology now supports the famous story about Mad Jack Fuller, who one night rashly bet that the spire of Dallington Church could be seen from his windows. Morning showed a hill stood in the way. When the cone-shaped folly Fuller had built to defy fact and win his bet was restored in 1961 it proved to be made of ...”

“... himself withdrew from circulation in the UK because of arguments about its depiction of violence; Jack Nicholson’s manic performance as writer-turned-axe-murderer: all of these images and associations, from Paths of Glory (1957), Spartacus (1959), Dr Strangelove (1964), 2001 (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971) and The Shining (1980) respectively, are ...”

“... so many of them, all involved in varying degrees of Brexit: Cameron, Johnson and Rees-Mogg; Zac Goldsmith and Jesse Norman; Alexander Nix, the co-founder of Cambridge Analytica; Nigel Oakes, the founder of its sinister parent company, SCL; Kwasi Kwarteng, the son of Ghanaian immigrants and a King’s Scholar at Eton, who went on to Cambridge and Harvard and ...”

“... compound idiom, both tactile and intellectual, and one cannot find a prototype for it in Swift or Goldsmith, any more than in Montaigne. My feeling is that largely Hazlitt made it up. Paulin, less satisfied, weighs in with Dissent. He reminds us that for the original believers in the moral sense, both words would have been stressed. Francis Hutcheson supposed ...”

“... It is easy to argue about the uncertain Irishness of certain writers. Was Sterne Irish? Was Oliver Goldsmith Irish? Was Robert Tressell Irish? Is Iris Murdoch Irish? But the argument about who was gay and who was not and how we know is more difficult. How can someone be gay if, as in the case of Gogol, there is no direct evidence? Yet if you trawl through ...”

“... by the faction currently in charge of the Labour Party. Ada Salter refused to fly the Union Jack from the town hall, preferring a red flag blazoned with local emblems; Alfred declared they were ‘out to abolish the working classes as such and create a classless society. That is what we mean by socialism.’ The Times declared him an extremist.The ...”

“... own conception. In a wild attempt to stop the cycle of suffering, he stabs his son with the same jack-knife he had used to murder his father. As the tragedy ends, the drumming hoofbeats resume. Purgatory is one of the boldest works of Yeats’s turbulent old age. Its reassertion, in the Old Man’s speeches, of the glories of the Protestant Ascendancy, and ...”

“... Chantry, John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, James Northcote and John Soane; and from the theatre, Jack Bannister, George Colman the younger, various Kembles, the long-deified Mrs Siddons and very many more. There were peers of the realm, baronets, famous churchmen, a duchess. One hundred or so of these subscribers had been the subjects or recipients of ...”

“... The former Conservative energy minister Greg Barker and the onetime Labour attorney general Peter Goldsmith have both taken leaves of absence from the House of Lords, which means their work for Russian interests does not have to be declared on the public record.London has an enabling industry of lawyers, lobbyists and PR firms, who are paid exorbitant fees to ...”

“... of all improvements, and with every prospect of sharing in the coming wealth of nations, became as Goldsmith described it in ‘The Deserted Village’:Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,Where wealth accumulates, and men decay;Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;A breath can make them, as a breath has made;But a bold peasantry, their ...”