“... years in one significant respect: his freedom from adherence to natural fact. That would, as Greg Smith argued in an illuminating recent essay, have set him squarely against one of the main aesthetic assumptions shared by his contemporaries.* ‘Nature is not at all the standard of art, but art is the standard of nature,’ runs one of the aphorisms Herbert ...”

“... would later tell people that Lytton Strachey was wrong to say that Brooke had ‘bandy legs’; in Michael Holroyd’s biography James sides with his brother: ‘Rupert had bandy legs, all the same.’) This was, as Delany writes, the high summer of Neo-Paganism: Brooke read Paradise Lost to his admirers high in a chestnut tree; canoed down the river at ...”

“... Richard Gambino’s Blood of My Blood: The Problem of Italian Americans, for example, and Michael Arlen’s Passage to Ararat. Capitalism turned all this into profit, initially through print publication and the rise of professional genealogy services, and on to the consumer DNA tests and paywalled online databases of today. Genealogy became ...”

“... seem to come in generational bursts). All writers on the Brontës now benefit from Margaret Smith’s magisterial – much overdue – edition of Charlotte’s extant letters, published by Oxford in three volumes between 1995 and 2004. Barker and Gordon have both made contributions to this anniversary season: Barker’s publishers have issued an updated ...”

“... through until her speech had been triumphantly delivered. If is impossible to imagine a Kinnock, Smith or Major having the energy, determination and professional confidence to carry this sort of thing off. Similarly, she has now produced a book which, whatever its bias and dishonesties, is far, far beyond the normal politician’s memoirs in its thoroughness ...”

“... therefore became, so to speak, theatrical squared. Their situation also made them competitive. As Michael Young was to point out in The Rise of the Meritocracy, élites based on education lack the security of the old aristocracies of land and money. To live by one’s wits is a nervous business: every younger brain, each new foot on the educational ladder, is ...”

“... those who questioned the propriety of the gift. Along with George Robertson, Mo Mowlam and Chris Smith, he was trained by the fascinating and secretive British-American Project for a Successor Generation, which instructs young and friendly natives, who look likely to climb the provincial ladder of power, on the advantages of following the American way. Do ...”

“... appreciation of the art of our time than Picasso the Charlatan. But the curious fact is that when Michael Ayrton in the Fifties or John Berger in the Sixties tried to react to the generally unctuous tone of what passed for Picasso criticism, they produced essays which rebounded more on themselves than on Picasso, though these are among the finest writers on ...”

“... of his book on ancient Sicily in 1968, part of a three-volume history initiated by Denis Mack Smith, that he attracted much attention and won the support of the publishing house of Laterza. Finley was one of the first English-speaking historians to be aware of the importance of the works of Ettore Cicotti, to whom he returns in Evidence and Models for his ...”

“... books on them’, included David Bonavia of the Times in London, Anthony Astrachan and Hedrick Smith of the New York Times, Robert Kaiser and Kevin Klose of the Washington Post, David Satter of the Financial Times and the BBC’s Moscow correspondent Denis Blakeley. Reading the list, I found myself mentally running through the names of noted Moscow ...”

“... dying horses and abandoned children. In The Element of Crime (1984), a ravaged cop called Fisher (Michael Elphick) struggles through a flooded landscape, trying to solve a crime. Fisher is a particularly bad detective: he has an affair with a prostitute who turns out to have been the lover of the murderer he is trying to find, then he accidentally murders the ...”

“... TV show Ready Steady Go!, and appeared in other films as well as Russell’s, including Alfie with Michael Caine. How much of her reputation came from her art and how much from herself is a question that haunts Kristal’s book as well as Pauline Boty: A Portrait, the catalogue for an exhibition of her work at Gazelli Art House earlier this year. Both have ...”

“... insight into how Labour thinks and works’. The former home secretary Jacqui Smith was a specialist partner at the firm until last month, when Starmer appointed her to the Lords and made her an education minister.At the party conference last year, Starmer told a ‘business forum’ of more than two hundred executives and lobbyists that ...”

“... and writing, began to hang out together. In the summer of 1964, Jacqueline and their son Michael went to Long Island while Brian stayed in New York working on The Emperor of Ice-Cream. Frank Russell, who had won a Guggenheim for his nature writing, also left New York. Brian and Jean became lovers that summer, and not long afterwards Jacqueline and ...”

“... partly because of the commotion caused by the change of national leadership, the passing of Michael Oakeshott did not attract much public notice. Even the Spectator, which might have been expected to mark the event with a full salute, ignored it for half a year, before carrying a curiously distracted piece by its editor, reporting strange losses in the ...”