“... idealists. What do these ancient arguments have to do with the world of Ruling Performance, with David Pannick’s reflections on the English judiciary, or with Vernon Bogdanor’s Encyclopedia of Political Institutions? For one thing, they cast light on the hopes and fears most of us entertain in the face of government activity of all sorts. Realists who ...”

“... not least because few effective tests existed. In the 1950s, the rulebook for the Tour de France still stated that riders who wished to use drugs would have to supply their own. Things began to change, at least publicly, when several speed skaters nearly died after overdosing on amphetamines during the 1952 games in Helsinki. Fifa became the first ...”

“... missed their targets. The real importance of the air war was at the front, in Italy as well as France and Belgium. By mid-1918 the Allies’ air superiority was preventing German reconnaissance planes from finding out very much about their preparations for attack, while they themselves were gaining accurate information about enemy dispositions. There was ...”

“... presents rooms crowded with friends, colleagues, students of both sexes and family members; in France, the Dictionnaire de l’Académie continued to refer to the atelier as a collective space until 1835.Elsewhere in Europe, the age of revolutions was giving rise to a different aesthetic, which rejected the idea of the studio as emporium of wonders, or ...”

“... yes to the first and no to the second. In many European countries it was the other way round. In France, for instance, it was decided that only the state could be permitted to benefit from the large profits to be made in the gambling business; anything else might threaten the moral fabric of the republic. But given it was the state that was benefiting, there ...”

“... all others. It was founded in Oxford by Edward Lean, the younger brother of the film director David Lean, and was dedicated to the reading and discussion of creative work in progress. When Lean graduated, Lewis took it over. The group was for men only. (Dorothy L. Sayers, a keen Christian and an admirer of Lewis, was excluded.) At first, meetings were ...”

“... Belle du Seigneur in 1968; and is the object now of a growing scholarly and critical industry in France, with several books about him published in the last few years. The very first lines of Belle du Seigneur are these, and I’m not sure deference is possible here or would do us any good: ‘He dismounted and strode past hazel and briar, followed by the two ...”

“... has it, was brought to him mid-set). ‘At the peak of its popularity in the 16th century,’ David Berry writes in his history of tennis, ‘Paris alone had 250 courts, including one at the Louvre and another at Versailles, the latter of which was occupied in the revolution of 1789 by the Third Estate as a symbolic protest at the elitist nature of this ...”

“... waiters, until it becomes their proper nature. It is the same with writers and artists. Byron or David or Robert Lowell cannot slink off and become their ordinary selves in the intervals of being poets and painters and men of the age. Greta Garbo is always Greta Garbo, once she has found the part. But there is quite a different category of actor, as of ...”

“... the Final Solution was intentionally such that very few records of essential decisions were kept; David Irving may even be formally right in his assertion that there is no written document to link Hitler himself with the Final Solution until October 1943; and the same absence or confusion in the written record has even been taken as evidence that the whole ...”

“... energy supply now hinges on state-owned French companies based in Paris: Electricité de France, better known as EDF, and Areva, maker of nuclear power stations. Will EDF and Areva build a fleet of new nuclear reactors in Britain or won’t they, and if they do, how much will it cost the British and French public? Defending her record in Parliament ...”

“... the mendacity or hypocrisy of a public man who says one thing and privately does another. In 2007, David Runciman devoted his Carlyle Lectures at Oxford to the subject of hypocrisy – not hypocrisy in general, but hypocrisy in politics. It is a wonderful topic. Everyone knows that politics is partly a matter of ritual and ceremony, deception and ...”

“... on an unprecedented scale is vividly illustrated in The Great Purges, which contains some of David King’s collection of contemporary photographs, together with a commentary by Isaac Deutscher: ‘In presenting these scenes, I had to reconstruct a nightmare.’ We must hope that, for a majority or Russians, their dreams have become pleasanter: but we do ...”

“... fail to maintain her pretence of leadership. Neil Kinnock may, despite himself, take over. David Owen may come out of his increasingly conservative camouflage to capture that middle ground on which success in British politics has been said, with decreasing plausibility, to rest. None, however, has a politically able team behind them. Almost anything ...”

“... wrote. Stravinsky of course remained immune – but that’s another story. The first volume of David Nice’s Prokofiev biography stops when the 44-year-old composer settles in Moscow with his Spanish wife, Lina, and two young sons at the end of 1935. But it describes in detail the eight preceding years, during which Prokofiev lived and worked as a ...”