“... aliens. (Nor is this particular combination confined to Los Angeles, as is illustrated by Peter Brimelow’s borrowing of the title of the 1988 science fiction film, Alien Nation, for the anti-immigrant tract he published seven years later.) Congresswoman Seastrand invokes Sodom and Gomorrah because ‘we probably have the most adulterers living here ...”

“... author (George Gilder), a leading radical economist (Tom Weisskopf) and the creator of Jaws (Peter Benchley). About a quarter of us had come to Harvard from one of ten famous boarding schools of the northeast, but about a half had attended public high schools across the country. With its massive endowments supporting extensive scholarships, Harvard had ...”

“... a considerable feat of expansion – but no other kind of feat. At its best, Bardic Romance rose to the sort of picturesque realism that Stephen Dedalus pastiched in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’: The flag is up on the playhouse by the bankside. The bear Sackerson growls in the pit near it, Paris garden. Canvasclimbers who sailed with Drake chew their ...”

“... at the Coronation of George IV, a figure in the crowd, describing the ‘silken roar’ as it rose. The Carlyles trail glumly through the chapter on building, hunting for a suitable house. With the exception of a disappointing essay on the theatre the accounts interconnect and cross-refer without repetition to make the cumulative effect highly ...”

“... rate to protect his anti-inflationary policy. The markets promptly took the hint and the pound rose strongly. There can be little doubt that if the authorities had wanted to enter at a lower rate they could have engineered this over the preceding months. The third bad aspect of the decision was that the ERM had changed from the earlier version that we ...”

“... the happy beam-hunter of 1940 and premier intelligencer thereafter (... and Science), Norman Rose (and Zionism) and Roy Jenkins (the Government of 1951-55) are predictably good. The uneven John Keegan (... ’s Strategy), though seemingly disqualified by his recent published confession that he cannot understand Clausewitz, nevertheless succeeds ...”

“... boys’, however overwrought the language, he spoke a rhetorical truth. The applause that rose spontaneously from the crowds outside and was first heard inside the abbey like the pattering of rain was taken up by the congregation like a cathartic sigh. The danger passed. Nobody tried to shoot Charles and nobody, despite the rumours, threw bread rolls ...”

“... School of Art, was sent out under the name Jacob Morrow: romantic thrillers with titles like Rose of Rubies (serialised in the Portsmouth News), Here Is Murder, The Black Scarab. In December 1929, Jacob Morrow won fourth prize in a short-story competition run by the Hampshire Telegraph. Soon afterwards, she began to sign her work O.M. Manning, but it was ...”

“... led to cost over-runs that pushed Koons to the point of bankruptcy. But when his auction prices rose sharply, one of his dealers, Jeffrey Deitch, was able to assemble a consortium of gallery owners and patrons to buy some of the pieces in advance, sight unseen. (It turned out to be a smart investment: in 2007, one such work, Hanging Heart ...”

“... walls, as in a Wren City church, were juxtaposed with piers cased in timber at the base which then rose into arches without capitals in between – all most irregular. It took years to furnish St Agnes with the wealth of screens and fittings Scott wanted. All Hallows never got that far before funds ran dry. It is often said that the late Victorian ...”

“... her cap of auburn hair shining like burnished gold on her head. Nearer to the house, in the rose-garden, their younger daughter, seven-year-old Perdita, strange, mysterious and self-absorbed as usual, was beheading a litter of puppies with unexpectedly muscular and adult twists of her slender arms. Her cap of golden hair shone like burnished auburn on ...”

“... were moved, erected and – at first – exorcised and capped with crosses. Statues of Saints Peter and Paul crowned the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius. Great palaces and spectacular churches rose to serve as stages for the city’s magnificent religious and political pageants. Kircher actively helped his adopted ...”

“... history-aware viewer who registers also the dragon-vanquishing knight-cum-king, the fair English rose he’s redeeming, and the notional ‘poor folk’ who look on in hope of salvation, sharing the foreground with a hideous slough of dragon-chewed corpses. This heartfelt conservative fantasia was painted in the early 1630s. Charles’s grapples with the ...”

“... murder mystery set several hundred years ago in Italy can’t help but recall The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, who makes an appearance in Binet’s earlier novel The Seventh Function of Language – though where Eco’s plot turns on a secret copy of a lost book, Binet’s this time revolves around a lost cycle of paintings. Another obvious precursor ...”

“... soon followed, to restore Ferdinand VII’s absolute rule, and the allies stood by when the Greeks rose up against their Ottoman rulers. By the time of the 1848 revolutions, ‘holy alliance’ had become an all-purpose signifier for a reactionary cabal. When Marx and Engels searched for a term to describe the enemies of communism, they naturally invented a ...”