“... narrative invention, such as why it matters so much whether Batman told the whole truth to valiant Robin, given that he would be killed instantly either way – or why the sinless Sinon wants in on the scheme, if the sack of Troy was as bad as the movie wants to suggest. Odysseus’ lie to Sinon doesn’t start the Trojan War, and the Trojans would presumably ...”

“... as the murderer of a great and courageous feminist poet. In 1972 the American poet and activist Robin Morgan published Monster, a book that included a piece in which a gang of Plath aficionados are imagined castrating Hughes, stuffing his penis into his mouth and then blowing out his brains. In Britain a militant anti-Hughes faction took to chiselling his ...”

“... Forster forged a famously durable relationship with the Buckinghams, was godfather to their son Robin (who died of Hodgkin’s disease in 1962), and chose to die at their house in Coventry. ‘I have never so known anyone before,’ he writes in 1943, and marvels that Bob ‘has been living and moving against me for 13 years’. So he confounded his earlier ...”

“... are answerable – politically to Parliament, legally to the courts. That the government of the day has no separate sovereignty in this paradigm is both axiomatic and a reminder of the sharpest of all the lessons of Eastern Europe: that it is when state is collapsed into party that democracy founders. To assume a jurisdiction of this kind is of course to ...”

“... amount of cash based on the difference between the contracted price and the spot price on delivery day. Eventually futures became common in virtually all agricultural commodity and natural resource markets, and then in markets for almost anything, from fishmeal to scrap metal to stock indices. (There are a couple of exceptions: futures in onions have been ...”

“... he says in his autobiography, ‘that the world’s end was at the edge of the horizon and that a day’s journey was able to find it’. He thought that when he reached the brink of the world he would find a large pit, and would be able to look down and see the secrets of the universe. He spent the whole day rambling among ...”

“... singer and activist whose rich, deep gospel voice adorns Staple Singers numbers like ‘Uncloudy Day’. They had met in New York in the early 1960s and, in her words, ‘court[ed] awhile’. These pages are alive with mental movement, as poets’ drafts always are, and it occurs to me that these multiple studio takes – all these ...”

“... his occasional quotations from Wordsworth. A famous photograph shows him in country clothes with a robin perched on his hat. This lifelong rusticity led many to label him an insular amateur of limited ambition. As incoming prime minister in 1905, Henry Campbell-Bannerman was reluctant to make Grey foreign secretary because of ‘his ignorance of foreign ...”

“... history obsessives, novelists (Hilary Mantel, Sarah Waters, Madeline Miller), classicists (Robin Lane Fox, Bettany Hughes), historians (Tom Holland), who salute her muscular resurrections of the classical world, and gay men who see her as a pioneer in her writing about homosexual relationships. Along with hundreds of other gay men, many of them ...”

“... Fair, dispensing justice to the just. Pearson shades the portrait to reveal the Twins as a pair of Robin Hoods, by way of Papa Doc Duvalier. The difference between Pearson and the B-team that followed in his footsteps is that he became a ghost before the corpse had died. His name is above the title: in yellow print, superimposed over the famous (and ...”

“... of days of this, Louis had the churches on the route closed until Henry had passed by. The next day, Henry turned up on time, declaring that he could not possibly attend the talks because all the churches were closed, which must mean that Paris was under a papal interdict. Louis confessed his ruse, and asked Henry why he insisted on hearing so many ...”

“... portly practitioner is unlikely to have sought the informed consent of either Christopher Robin or his parents before he gave him what goes for a cold in the nose and some more for a cold in the head. Nor, probably, would he have done so before performing a tonsillectomy (which may be why a whole generation has been pointlessly deprived of this ...”

“... her hand. Low cloud obscures the hilltops in the background. In the words of the art historian Robin Nicholson, ‘this is an image of complete hopelessness, of lassitude and despair and, in the case of the shepherd, an element of stoic indifference.’People leave places for different reasons. In Ramsay’s poem, a young man is leaving both his West ...”

“... and staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on Valentine’s Day, vowed in a comment on a YouTube video that ‘Elliot Rodger will not be forgotten.’) Feminist commentators were quick to point out what should have been obvious: that no woman was obligated to have sex with Rodger; that his sense of sexual entitlement was ...”

“... before the Civil War, but hardly one touched on the great constitutional controversies of the day. Far from articulating a concern that monarchy might be growing absolutist, he seemed worried that the Crown was losing its grip (in particular that the Royal Supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs was being systematically eroded by high-flying ...”