“... property and political influence in the West Country. The poet’s overbearing father, Sir Richard, and his elder brother, Sir Charles, would between them represent Exeter or Devon in Parliament with little interruption between 1743 and 1812. John Bampfylde was educated by private tutors at the family home at Poltimore near Exeter, and later at ...”

“... tradition of directly translating subjective impressions into economic terms’. Even Richard Wollheim, who rarely rises above an abject appreciativeness in his dealings with Freud, concedes that Freud ‘sometimes treated propositions about energy and its liberation as though they were descriptions of introspectible phenomena’. This ...”

“... was as mystifying as a book written by a judge and called Overcoming Law. The judge in this case, Richard Posner, is the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. He is also a senior lecturer in law at Chicago University and a widely published polemicist. At the heart of his polemics are three pulses, legal pragmatism, Millian ...”

“... an inch of difference between Labour and Conservatives, the one-time counter-culture celebrity Richard Neville said long ago, but it is in that space that we live. The opening weeks of the first Labour Government for a generation have been a daily reminder of how far Neville’s aphorism still holds. So tirelessly had Tony Blair strained to ratchet down ...”

“... is probably the one that rests most heavily on potentially verifiable claims about reality. As Richard Dawkins observes, Religions make existence claims, and this means scientific claims. The same is true of many of the major doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. The Virgin birth, the bodily Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Resurrection of ...”

“... Roy Foster’s review in the New Republic was entitled ‘’Tisn’t’. But however unlikely his powers of recall or underdrawn his characters, McCourt’s books and manner are engaging. The historian Richard White describes his book as an ‘anti-memoir’. White, who teaches history at Stanford, has traced the story of ...”

“... to be talking about Dante, Shakespeare and Martin Amis.’ The text of the Time Out feature by Richard Rayner, one of the most impressive of all the discussions, is also a study in contrasts, containing a highly unillusioned portrait of Amis’s public personality alongside an intelligent and generous appraisal of his novels.The star fiction-reviewers were ...”

“... of the US Federal Reserve in 1972 to raise interest rates and risk a recession that would weaken Richard Nixon’s chances of re-election. When Paul Volcker was made the Fed chair in 1979, he acted without regard for the potential political fallout, raising interest rates to nearly 20 per cent and causing unemployment to rocket; in 1982, it reached a high of ...”

“... it can be that a stone, a plant, a star, can take on the burden of being.’ But where all his powers were concentrated, Agee could build to more sustained recognitions; as in the intense rendering of the plain faces of a man and a woman: The young man’s eyes had the opal lightings of dark oil and, though he was watching me in a way that relaxed me to ...”

“... National Assembly, largely filled with Chávez supporters, gave the President emergency powers. Putting on the camouflage uniform and red beret that he had worn eight years earlier when leading a military rebellion against the old order, he took charge of the rescue operations. Football grounds and stadiums were opened as makeshift accommodation for ...”

“... had to be thanks to the dizzying succession of treaties of offence and defence between Europe’s powers. Henry’s first effort to flex his muscles in France, in 1513, saw him lead an army of something like 28,000 men joined in France by around seven thousand German and Dutch mercenaries. At the same time a force of more than 26,000 marched north at speed to ...”

“... Here and there we find people attempting tasks which nobody had supposed to be within their powers, like Beaverbrook who ‘failed to secure the re-election of Churchill in 1945’. The entry on John Masefield strikes a new note. ‘In “Sea Fever” he wrote: “I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gipsy life,” but, in fact, he had ...”

“... until they quarrelled (which Strindberg did sooner or later with most of his friends), the poet Richard Dehmel, the magazine editor Julius Meier-Graefe and Knut Hamsun, but not Sibelius – he couldn’t stand the noise. Wherever he lived, Strindberg needed such ‘clubs’, as well as a garden where he could grow things. He was also beginning to have ...”

“... ends, they resume their hostility to government activism. The Civil War era greatly expanded the powers of the national government. But it was soon succeeded by the Gilded Age, when laissez-faire reigned supreme. During World War One, the Government conscripted soldiers, increased taxes, regulated industry and labour and suppressed dissent. But in ...”

“... out above all the others for candour, authority, and sheer volume of precisely recorded detail: Richard Crossman’s The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, especially volumes one and three which cover the years when he was at the head of two major spending departments, Housing and Health. I am in any case a sucker for diaries, and not just because they so often ...”